Same Blood

by Mermer Blakeslee

Margaret Becker, a single mother getting by on food stamps and social services, wrests for herself an unusual peace in this backwoods world. Comic and moving in turns, Margaret’s journey encompasses her unique extended family: Beulah, Tappen, and Doro, who take her into their odd but loving household; Jo, the town prostitute she befriends; and Billy, the abandoned boy Margaret adopts after her own child dies. The bonds among them are strong, often mute, and intensely intuitive as they move through the passages that mark rural life: birth, sex, survival, death, loss, violence, protection, the raising of children. Set in the Catskill Mountain region of upstate New York, Same Blood reveals how the raw physical truths of poverty, child abuse, and violence are overcome by the extraordinary use of myths and beliefs that heal.

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1988