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Overview
The explosive novel that introduced #1 New York Times bestselling author Terry McMillan
Meet Mildred Peacock, mother of five, black, and fed up with poverty and the jealous rampages of her husband, Crook. When Crook runs over her foot with his ’59 Mercury, she finally kicks him out to raise her kids on her own.
Mildred is resourceful and sly, sassy and sexy, and she’ll do anything to pay the bills. But she loses job after job, and one man after another, until alcohol and nerve pills are her only comfort. All along though, there are always her kids, the most important things in her life.
From the Midwest to the West Coast to New York, Mama moves with high-spirited realism through the 1960s and 1970s and the promises and disappointments that era meant for all black people.
With her phenomenal New York Times bestseller Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan became one of the most important American novelists writing today. Here, for the first time in mass market paperback, is her extraordinary first novel. It is the exhilarating tale of feisty Mildred Peacock, whose five children are her hope and her future.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
This is McMillan's zesty first novel about an impoverished black family's struggle to overcome its problems.Library Journal
Mama, a first novel, tells of a proud black woman, Mildred Peacock, and her five children. After a violent fight, Mildred throws her drunken husband out of the house. On her own in the poor town of Point Haven, Michigan, Mildred scrimps and drinks, works and goes on welfare, struggling to raise her kids and keep her sanity. Mildred's closest bond is to her oldest daughter, Freda, and their lives parallel each other's progress from despair to hope. The book's main weakness is that the author apparently could not decide what to leave out. She also has not decided who her audience is: at times she seems to be writing to blacks, at other times to be explaining things to naive white readers. Although the story has power, it lacks focus and a clear point of view.-- Janet Boyarin Blundell, MLS, Brookdale Community College Adjunct Faculty, Lincroft, New Jersey