Turnip Blues by Helen Campbell

From the Publisher

A female buddy book about two feisty 75-year-olds who set to visit the grave of legendary blues artist Bessie Smith, Turnip Blues offers a brilliant collage of personalities and relationships, family and friends, that is alternately heartwrenching, bittersweet, and humorous.

Publishers Weekly

Mary Kuzo and Mary Lemack, the 75-year-old heroines of this heartfelt, occasionally cutesy debut, have been friends since the seventh grade and have seen each other through joy and grief (they have buried four husbands between them). So when the exuberant Mrs. Lemack decides to make a seven-hour pilgrimage from the western Pennsylvania town of Braddock to the Philadelphia grave of her idol, Bessie Smith, wry, arthritic narrator Mrs. Kuzo naturally (if reluctantly) goes along for the ride. Seated in the passenger's seat of Mrs. Lemack's Firebird, Mrs. Kuzo has plenty of time to remember her past, recalling the prejudice she and other Slavs faced as "Hunkies," her economic struggles, her clashes with her family, their suffering over the death of a sister and the ravages brought down on them by class prejudice and alcoholism. Ably characterized and deftly comic, this elderly-widows-on-the-road tale is marked by a breezy style that makes a pungent counterpoint to the actual tribulations of both women's lives.

What People Are Saying

Sandra Martz
Turnip Blues shines its light on the lives of two gritty old women whose indomitable spirits carry them through the hardships of their "outsider" status as members of the poor, immigrant families. This is a book that takes us into the heart of two women who remind us what America is really all about!
—(Sandra Martz, Editor, When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple)

Product Details