The Big Mama Stories
(click Title to Order)
by Shay Youngblood
Pub. Price $8.95 B&N Price: $7.16
Publisher: Firebrand Books
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: October 1992
Review From Publisher's Weekly:
These folktale-like stories, told by a young woman about her ``mamas''--the several women
who raised her following the death of her mother--capture the dialect and climate of the
black South of the '60s. Each work centers around one of the mamas; the narrative voice
throughout is intimate and assured--Youngblood maintains a near-flawless cadence and a
consistent tone with subtlety and grace. Unfortunately, a taut style cannot compensate for
the flatness of her characters and the predictability of their actions. The issues
addressed in this fiction debut--obsessive love, parenting, loyalty, continuity, the
initiation of a girl into womanhood--are trivialized by cursory treatment of the
characters and superficial interpretations. Incompletely or insufficiently differentiated,
Youngblood's women begin to blur. Although she may have intended to overlap their
personalities in order to demonstrate that the combined resources of many ``mamas'' in
raising the protagonist are more effective than those of one woman alone, the resulting
homogeneity inhibits this collection. (July) -Publisher's Weekly