One Good Mama Bone

December 15, 2016
A single mother and her son raise a steer with hopes of winning a cash prize in the local 4-H competition. Complicated relationships layer this story, set in the early 1950s in South Carolina. Sarah Creamer unexpectedly becomes a mother to the baby who resulted from her best friend's affair with her husband after her friend commits suicide following the delivery. Nearly seven years later, Sarah's husband drinks himself to death, leaving her a single mother solely responsible for paying the family's debts. Desperate to provide her son, Emerson Bridge, with food, Sarah makes a dress to sell to the wealthy Mildred Dobbins, wife of the cattleman and landowner Luther Dobbins. After Sarah reads about a steer winning $680 in a competition, she buys a calf from Luther in hopes that Emerson Bridge will win the championship the next year to raise their family out of poverty--and thinking that the calf would be a friend for her son. The young steer, Lucky, is soon joined in the Creamers' yard by his mother, who broke through the Dobbins' fences to find her calf. As Sarah struggles with how to be a good mother to Emerson Bridge, she looks to the mother cow, whom she names Mama Red, for guidance and also forms an unlikely friendship with Mildred Dobbins. The two families become further entangled since the Dobbins' son, LC, is also raising a steer for the 4-H competition. Emerson Bridge and LC become friends and the stakes become even higher as Luther, who desperately wants his family to win the contest, turns increasingly violent and erratic. Through all of these connections, McClain's first novel resists predictability and instead weaves together questions about poverty, class, violence, and religion as these two families question what parent-child relationships should be. The short, clipped sentences can make the story difficult to follow at times, but the language does help establish Sarah more fully as a character. Sarah's relationship with Mama Red sometimes obscures the development of other relationships, such as the one between Sarah and her landlord, and the ending perhaps reaches a bit too much toward a closure that the characters themselves won't find. A thought-provoking story about families and the animals who sustain them.

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Starred review from January 1, 2017
As a child, Sarah Creamer was told by her mother that you ain't got you one good mama bone in you, child. As a widow in 1950s rural South Carolina, Sarah is still haunted by those words as she struggles to make ends meet for herself and seven-year-old Emerson Bridge, the illegitimate son of her husband and her best friend. Winning the grand prize at the local Fat Cattle Show and Sale could put the family on stable financial footing, but the calf they purchase to raise is soon joined by its mother, who has escaped from the rancher's pasture. Sarah takes the mother cow, Mama Red, as her model as she strives to be a mother to her adopted son. But as the competition nears, Sarah and Emerson Bridge are forced to confront their own naivete about the fate of the winning calf turned steer and what it will mean for Mama Red and for their own family. First-time novelist McClain draws on her family's history in the rural South to create a cast of deeply relatable characters, both human and animal, who readers will find themselves rooting for until the very last page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)