What Experts are Saying About
The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble
"Wonderful and wonder-filled. A wise travel into and through the soul of the South. Readers intrigued by On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon will find in these pages a powerful bookend."
—Alice Randall, a Harvard educated African-American writer who teaches at Vanderbilt and writes country songs, is the author of The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, and Rebel Yell.
The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble showcases Myra McLarey’s ability to spin one of the richest and liveliest Southern sagas of contemporary times. The intimate narrative voice tells a complex and nuanced story about people for whom the past is as immediate as the pres-ent, and history itself becomes as full-blooded a character as Rosetta herself. Readers are in for a captivating journey.
—Jessica Treadway, teaches in the MFA program at Emerson and is the author of And Give you Peace and Please Come Back to Me, winner of the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
I do love a good story, well told—and that is just what The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble by Myra McLarey is. And how satis-fying that Rosetta Sugars Tramble accomplished what she did in her own way. Even better, it is based on events in SW Arkansas, told in Myra McLarey's clear, beautiful prose. You know these people.
—Mary Gay Shipley, owner of That Bookstore in Blytheville.
What a delight: full of sly, funny, salt of the earth people whom we believe in and honestly care about, and full, too, of much gloriously poetic prose, plus intriguing and conceivably true homespun lore, an abundance of Biblical quotations that add a rich depth to the tale, and the fresh, wonder-ful, folk expressions of Arkansas. McLarey has adopted a fascinating, plural, narrative voice—a cracker barrel or front porch storyteller’s voice that casually invites the reader into a yarn that is more concerned with re-lationships, ancestors, origins, and "the reason for" than it is with plot. It felt completely possible. The book is charming and droll and compas-sionate, and it feels utterly true even when Mark Twain seems to be wink-ing at us. I haven’t read anything like it since Eudora Welty last wrote.
—Ron Hansen, Gerald Manley Hopkins Chair at Santa Clara Univer-sity, is the author of of Atticus, Mariette in Ecstasy, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
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