Private Parts

Rebecca T. Godwin

REVIEWS

"Mattie is only 17 when she marries Jimmy Lee, youngest son of the Turners, who own the premier department store in tiny Red Hill, SC. At first Mattie tries to adhere to traditional wifely precepts...to win over her mother-in-law and to master the complexities of Red Hill society. In chapters that are alternately introspective, wistful, and biting, the undereducated but perceptive Mattie details episodes in a painful, 22-year voyage of self-discovery. Godwin chooses original and telling moments."

—Publishers Weekly


"Ms. Godwin's book is very straightforward. What astonishes me is how much life is so convincingly wrought in so short a space...I credit the voice of the narrator with the combined sensations of speed and fullness. And I admire the intelligence. As I read, I wasn't certain whether to praise Mattie Turner or Rebecca Godwin for that intelligence...Ms. Godwin's technical victory is in point of view and tone of voice, but the world we get through Mattie's eyes is so true, so startlingly accurate in her observations, so refreshingly apt, so witty, that I wouldn't want to call Private Parts only well crafted. It's too true and rich for that."

—Marietta Daily Journal


"You can almost hear Mattie Turner's flat, low-country South Carolina accent as she tells about her life—remarkable for its unremarkability—in Rebecca Godwin's debut novel, Private Parts....Godwin's Mattie is Every Southern Woman, living in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business....Readers will want to cheer for this smart, straight-talking woman."

—Book Pages


"'I'm ready,' Mattie, age seventeen, announces as she dresses on commencement night. Private Parts is a novel for anyone who has ever been old enough to tell and young enough to believe that lie. A documentary...of the triumph of survival."

—Mary Hood, author of And Venus is Blue and Familiar Heat


"Gritty and rueful and comic, too...Rarely does a first novel show the focus and drive that this one does."

—Mark Steadman, author of A Lion's Share and McAfee County

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