Set in the early 1950s rural South, 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 on 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, wanting to
regain his lost Grand Champion dynasty, and he will stop at nothing
to win. Emboldened by her lessons from Mama Red and her budding
mama bone, Sarah is fully committed to victory until she learns the
winning steer's ultimate fate. Will she stop at nothing, even if it
means betraying her teacher? McClain's writing is distinguished by
a sophisticated and detailed portrayal of the day-to-day realities
of rural poverty and an authentic sense of time and place that
marks the best southern fiction. Her characters transcend their
archetypes, and her animal-as-teacher theme recalls the likes of
Water for Elephants and The Art of Racing in the Rain. One Good
Mama Bone explores the strengths and limitations of parental love,
the healing power of the human-animal bond, and the ethical
dilemmas of raising animals for food. Mary Alice Monroe, a New York
Times and USA Today best-selling author of eighteen novels and two
children's books, provides a foreword to the novel.
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