Product Description(Amazon.com)
How does one live in a house of the dead? Kate Mayfield explores what it meant to be the daughter of a small-town undertaker in this fascinating memoir evocative of Six Feet Under and The Help, with a hint of Mary Roach’s Stiff.
After Kate Mayfield was born, she was taken directly to a funeral home. Her father was an undertaker, and for thirteen years the family resided in a place nearly synonymous with death, where the living and the dead entered their house like a vapor. In a memoir that reads like a Harper Lee novel, Mayfield draws the reader into a world of haunting Southern mystique.
In the turbulent 1960s, Kate’s father set up shop in sleepy Jubilee, Kentucky, a segregated, god-fearing community where no one kept secrets—except the ones they were buried with. By opening a funeral home, Frank Mayfield also opened the door to family feuds, fetishes, murder, suicide, and all manner of accidents. Kate saw it all—she also witnessed the quiet ruin of her father, who hid alcoholism and infidelity behind a cool and charismatic façade. As Kate grows from trusting child to rebellious teen, the enforced sobriety of the funeral home begins to chafe, and she longs for the day she can escape the confines of Jubilee and her place as the undertaker’s daughter.
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books; Reprint edition (July 14, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1476757291
ISBN-13: 978-1476757292
MY THOUGHTS: This was a wonderful book. I loved reading about all the characters in this small rural southern town. This book reminded me a lot of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Help by Katheryn Stockett. I have read both of those books and enjoyed them both. Kate is a typical little girl, asking lots of questions and doing what her parents tell her to. But as she gets older she starts to wonder about some things that no one wants to discuss. So Kate rebels against the rules of her parents and society. I give the book 5....
This book is also for my Full House Reading Challenge...Number 4.
This sounds like an interesting read. I imagine it must have been a different life for the author growing up as she did. Outside my realm of experience for sure.
ReplyDelete