Same Blood - Hardcover

Blakeslee, Mermer

3.88

8 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395486017 ISBN 13: 9780395486016

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989

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Margaret Becker, a single mother surviving on food stamps in the backwoods of the Catskill Mountains, reinvigorates her life through the adoption of an extended family

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From Publishers Weekly:

With unerring precision, this remarkable first novel evokes the mean lives of Catskill dirt farmers: wounded cars sprouting in every yard, a gaggle of illegitimate children, often conceived incestuously, endemic drunkenness, casual adultery. The story revolves around Margaret Becker, a woman who has "just about always cleaned houses for a living,' " and now comes home to her three-year-old son, born out of wedlock. Managing to rise from the squalor, Margaret's strong spirit uncovers beneath the bovine exteriors of people she has known all her life an answering spirit. Margaret is that rare person who, Zen-like, takes on the essence of those she loves. Thus it is that Beulah, the farm woman who brings Margaret into her home, is cured of cancer by Margaret's formidable powers. So too, when Margaret rescues three-year-old Billy, starving, speechless and traumatized, she can unclasp the disembodied fingers of his dead mother and free the child. Yet grounding the book in the everyday world are precise details of cows calving, horses broken and trained, potatoes stored against winter frost. Little people, minor characters, pathetic survivors of illness and ignorance, come to life in Blakeslee's distinctive vernacular voice, as she dares to explore and make credible perceptions beyond our understanding. This is an impressive debut.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

"I feel stupid goin' on like this but this is my life and Marilyn, she's the lady from Social Services who comes to talk and to make sure I don't have no more kids, she told me that I should git out what I feel or she says I'll take it out on Bubby." Margaret Becker's vulgar, moving, awkward, sometimes joyous narrative of her squalid life in the Catskills includes blow-by-blow descriptions of Bubby's conception and birth and of the comfort she finds with the local prostitute. Blakeslee can certainly write, but only fans of Tobacco Road and The Beans of Egypt, Maine will appreciate her first novel. Not a necessary purchase. Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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