Set in early 1950s rural South Carolina, One Good Mama Bone chronicles Sarah Creamer's quest to find her "mama bone," after she is left to care for a boy who is not her own but instead is the product of an affair between her husband and her best friend and neighbor, a woman she calls "Sister." When her husband drinks himself to death, Sarah, a dirt-poor homemaker with no family to rely on and the note on the farm long past due, must find a way for her and young Emerson Bridge to survive. But the more daunting obstacle is Sarah's fear that her mother's words, seared in her memory since she first heard them at the age of six, were a prophesy, "You ain't got you one good mama bone in you, girl."When Sarah reads in the local newspaper that a boy won $680 with his Grand Champion steer at the recent 1951 Fat Cattle Show & Sale, she sees this as their financial salvation and finds a way to get Emerson Bridge a steer from a local farmer to compete in the 1952 show. But the young calf is unsettled at Sarah's farm, crying out in distress and growing louder as the night wears on. Some four miles away, the steer's mother hears his cries and breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to go in search of him. The next morning Sarah finds the young steer quiet, content, and nursing a large cow. Inspired by the mother cow's act of love, Sarah names her Mama Red. And so Sarah's education in motherhood begins with Mama Red as her teacher. But Luther Dobbins, the man who sold Sarah the steer, has his sights set on winning too, and, like Sarah, he is desperate, but not for money. Dobbins is desperate for glory, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her lessons from Mama Red and her budding mama bone, Sarah is committed to victory even after she learns the winning steer's ultimate fate.
Author Bio: Bren McClain is a writer, who never gave up. After winning a handful of awards over the last two decades for novel excerpts and short stories, her literary novel, ONE GOOD MAMA BONE, found a home with Pat Conroy's Story River Books. The novel is long-listed for the 2018 Crook'Äôs Corner Book Prize, received a starred review in 'Booklist,' named a winter Okra pick by the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance and made a Pulpwood Queens selection for May. 'Deep South' magazine included it in its recommended list of upcoming Fall/Winter books. Bren is a two-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project and the recipient of the 2005 Fiction Fellowship by the South Carolina Arts Commission. She is at work on her next novel, TOOK, which was named the gold medal winner for the 2016 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Novel-in-Progress.
Author: Bren McClain
Narrator: Bren McClain
Publisher: ListenUp Production LLC
ISBN Number: 9781945213465
Total Runtime: 11:55:08
