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The debut novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is a gutsy, funny, tragic and completely original work for fans of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.In the 1950s, in a small southern town in the US, the Beedes are the lowest of the low. Always struggling, they remain shackled by poverty and their own lack of ambition. Everyone, but sixteen-year-old Billie Beede.Billy Beede has big ideas about her life. She's had the Beede misfortune to get pregnant by an itinerant coffin salesman. And when he proves to have a wife and seven kids in another town, she determines to try her luck elsewhere. The answer seems to be in the hem of her mother's dress, her mother who died ten years ago. The rumour is that Willa Mae a Billie Holiday look-alike was the only Beede who made good, and was buried with a pearl necklace and a diamond ring sewn into the hem of her dress.Billie and all her relatives aim to get their hands on this treasure and make something of themselves. What follows is a mad road trip that evokes shades of Faulkner in its potent earthiness but also has the approachability and warmth of novels like The Colour Purple. This is a fantastic debut novel from an accomplished and well-loved American playwright.
I need to start out by saying that I LOVED this book by Suzan-Lori Parks. Really loved it. The first 30 or so pages didn't start of particularly well for me and I wasn't sure I was going to like it but I pushed through and I am glad I did because it truly was an excellent book. A great combination of tragedy, folly, and comedy. Well written in what I would call great bursts of writing, the author tells the story of what can only be referred to as a family and a loose confederation of people on the road to recover what they think is "buried treasure" in the form of jewels that were buried with one Willa Mae Beede upon her death. The protagonist here--her daughter Billy Beede--is a knocked up 16 year old girl who isn't sure if she wants to keep her baby or get an abortion but she knows one thing for sure and that is she needs money. All of the characters in this small Texas town are poor as poor can be. So Billy comes up with this idea to go find her mother who she believes was buried with a pearl necklace and diamond ring, unearth her body, and sell the jewels for money. Unfortunately, getting to this small town is no small task and it appears many others have the same idea including her Uncle and one-legged Aunt, Willa Mae's lesbian lover Dill, and several others including a distant cousin Laz who they met on the way to dig up mom. A really well written book that will leave you alternately laughing and crying but also realizing that when someone is so poor, they would resort to almost anything they think is realistic to pull themselves out of poverty.