" Suzan Lori Parks is a Pulitzer Prize winner, which I guess just goes to show. I am somewhat baffled as to why the NACCP has not risen up in arms about this novel, which recounts the mishaps of a group of poor blacks who get involved in a project of traveling from Texas to Arizona to dig up the body of the mother of the main protagonist (for lack of a better word), because the grave is about to be bulldozed into a shopping mall parking lot, and the protagonist, Billy Beede, is a pregnant teenage girl badly in need of money so she can get an abortion and there is an old legend that the mother (who was no better than she ought to be, as my grandmother would say) was buried by her lesbian pig-farming partner while wearing her diamond ring and pearl necklace. The account is told in a series of small chapters from the point of view of different characters (and also, unfortunately, with a phonetic attempt to imitate their collective illiteracy as well as their lack of understanding of the world around them). The characters should have been more interesting than they were, including Billy’s uncle (a self-taught preacher who has lost his faith) and aunt (a one-legged woman who was left with the baptizing preacher when her family was on the way to California), a teenaged boy who lusts for Billy (and who eventually turns out to be smarter than he appears to be), the traveling salesman who made Billy pregnant, his long suffering wife, and a host of other Beedean relatives they meet along the way. I suppose the intent was to show us what it was like to be a resident of the south in those times. Frankly, William Faulkner did the same thing a lot better in As I Lay Dying. "
— JBradford, 1/4/2014