Hungry for Good Books blog
One Good Mama Bone brilliantly, yet softly, addresses the deep connection between us and the animals in our world Animal lovers, southern fiction fans, and those who simply like a well-told story will devour One Good Mama Bone just as they would the best home-made biscuits and gravy.
lcweekly.com
Among other kudos, McClain's novel was named a 2017 Great Group Reads selection by the Women's National Book Association, and long listed for The Crook's Corner Book Prize Foundation for the best debut novel set in the American South.
Sumter Item
The plot and McClain's deeply developed characters are matched by her language. It is both realistic and poetic, simple and eloquent at once, and it will draw you in quickly and completely.
Lake Country Now
Beautiful book? You bet, and one you'll love.
Girl Who Reads
Beautifully written and so descriptive of life in the rural South.
Independent Mail
Brenda McClain's engrossing first novel... is peopled with complex, flawed characters who face dreadful dilemmas.
Southern Literary Review
It's a novel with a heart-breaking beginning whose conclusion is morally and emotionally satisfying.
Washington Independent Review of Books
The 1950s Deep South comes alive in this folkloric tale of love, sacrifice, and redemption.
IN Magazine
McClain brings forth a story that aches and pulses.
Booklist (starred review)
First-time novelist McClain draws on her family's history in the rural South to create a cast of deeply relatable characters, both human and animal, who readers will find themselves rooting for until the very last page.
From the Publisher
"McClain's first novel resists predictability and instead weaves together questions about poverty, class, violence, and religion. . . . A thought-provoking story about families and the animals who sustain them."--Kirkus Reviews
"McClain brings forth a story that aches and pulses."--IN Magazine
"Beautifully written and so descriptive of life in the rural South."--Girl Who Reads
"The 1950s Deep South comes alive in this folkloric tale of love, sacrifice, and redemption."--Washington Independent Review of Books
"First-time novelist McClain draws on her family's history in the rural South to create a cast of deeply relatable characters, both human and animal, who readers will find themselves rooting for until the very last page."--Booklist (starred review)
"The plot and McClain's deeply developed characters are matched by her language. It is both realistic and poetic, simple and eloquent at once, and it will draw you in quickly and completely."--Sumter Item
2017 Pulpwood Queens' Book of the Year!
"It's a novel with a heart-breaking beginning whose conclusion is morally and emotionally satisfying."--Southern Literary Review
"Beautiful book? You bet, and one you'll love."--Lake Country Now
"Among other kudos, McClain's novel was named a 2017 Great Group Reads selection by the Women's National Book Association, and long listed for The Crook's Corner Book Prize Foundation for the best debut novel set in the American South."--lcweekly.com
"Bren McClain's brilliant and ravishingly moving novel speaks eloquently for all of us who find our deepest humanity intimately connected with all the sentient creatures around us. Humane and universal, One Good Mama Bone is an instant classic."--Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"One Good Mama Bone is everything that Bren [McClain] is--smart, confident, unflinchingly honest, witty, wise, and possessing a reassuring wisdom and kindness that carries the reader from the story's heartbreaking beginnings to a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion. McClain's debut novel is a tour de force! . . . This is a novel that just might break your heart, and it might well heal it too, but with both acts Bren McClain will remind you of why each of us is entrusted with a heart in the first place."--Mary Alice Monroe, from the foreword
"Emotional bonds between humans and animals have long been written about, but never has the bond between a woman and a mother cow been placed front and center. It's about time. The world is ready for this true portrait of a mother cow's compassion and the lessons she has to teach us all. This is an important story whose time has come."-- Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary
"Bren McClain writes of elemental things with grace, wisdom, and power. One Good Mama Bone speaks with a quiet authority that comes through on every page."--Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Kirkus Reviews
2016-12-07
A single mother and her son raise a steer with hopes of winning a cash prize in the local 4-H competition. Complicated relationships layer this story, set in the early 1950s in South Carolina. Sarah Creamer unexpectedly becomes a mother to the baby who resulted from her best friend's affair with her husband after her friend commits suicide following the delivery. Nearly seven years later, Sarah's husband drinks himself to death, leaving her a single mother solely responsible for paying the family's debts. Desperate to provide her son, Emerson Bridge, with food, Sarah makes a dress to sell to the wealthy Mildred Dobbins, wife of the cattleman and landowner Luther Dobbins. After Sarah reads about a steer winning $680 in a competition, she buys a calf from Luther in hopes that Emerson Bridge will win the championship the next year to raise their family out of poverty—and thinking that the calf would be a friend for her son. The young steer, Lucky, is soon joined in the Creamers' yard by his mother, who broke through the Dobbins' fences to find her calf. As Sarah struggles with how to be a good mother to Emerson Bridge, she looks to the mother cow, whom she names Mama Red, for guidance and also forms an unlikely friendship with Mildred Dobbins. The two families become further entangled since the Dobbins' son, LC, is also raising a steer for the 4-H competition. Emerson Bridge and LC become friends and the stakes become even higher as Luther, who desperately wants his family to win the contest, turns increasingly violent and erratic. Through all of these connections, McClain's first novel resists predictability and instead weaves together questions about poverty, class, violence, and religion as these two families question what parent-child relationships should be. The short, clipped sentences can make the story difficult to follow at times, but the language does help establish Sarah more fully as a character. Sarah's relationship with Mama Red sometimes obscures the development of other relationships, such as the one between Sarah and her landlord, and the ending perhaps reaches a bit too much toward a closure that the characters themselves won't find. A thought-provoking story about families and the animals who sustain them.
