Seam Busters: A Novella

by Mary Hood

Overview

As war rages in Afghanistan, a job at a Southern cotton mill offers community and solace to a military mother in this heartfelt novella.
When Irene Morgan returns to Frazier Fabrics, a family-owned cotton mill in the hardscrabble heart of Ready, Georgia, she joins an eclectic group of women workers sharing their interwoven lives inside and outside the factory. Under constant surveillance and beholden to production quotas and endless protocols presented under the auspices of "American Pride," the women sew state-of-the-art camouflage for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, one of whom is Irene's son.
As Irene toils under the stress, she comes to embrace the camaraderie of her peers, some of whom play on the mill's bowling team, the Seam Busters. She comes to know Coquita, a shaky veteran returned from three tours in the Middle East; Kit, an angel-haired rule breaker unlucky in love; the stoic Hmong woman Sue Nag; the beaten but not yet defeated K'shaundra; and Jacky, a well-intentioned fool determined to be heard. When the shadow of death travels from the war front to the home front, Hood deftly braids the threads of these disparate lives into a lifeline for Irene.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611174991
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/12/2021
Series:	Story River Books
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mary Hood is the author of the novel Familiar Heat and two short story collections, How Far She Went (winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Southern Review/LSU Short Fiction Award) and And Venus Is Blue (winner of the Lillian Smith Award, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Dixie Council of Authors and Journalists Author of the Year Award). Hood's work has also been honored with the Whiting Writers' Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and a Pushcart Prize. A 2014 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Hood lives and writes in Commerce, Georgia.

What People are Saying About This

Dew on the Kudzu Idgie

Mary Hood has mastered the high wires of brevity and conciseness. Her deeply imagined characters speak as if they are offering their own true and often fabulous commentary on the book of life itself.

Pat Conroy

I don't believe Mary Hood is capable of writing an uninteresting sentence. She can say in three words what I can say in 160. Like all the great writers, Mary Hood has mastered the high wires of brevity and conciseness. Her deeply imagined characters in her novella Seam Busters, as in all of her writing, speak as if they are offering their own true and often fabulous commentary on the book of life itself.

Jan Nordby Gretlund

Mary Hood busts the seams of the 'factory-broken' farmers in Ready, Georgia, where the Diet Coke and the Bible are both open. When her son is brought back from 'A-Stan,' Irene Morgan is straightening inseams. Everybody, also the Hmong, mourns and is folded into America today. Hood's fiction brings back Erskine Caldwell's realism and Marion Montgomery's compassion.

Dot Jackson

Georgia novelist Mary Hood puts her fine gifts of scene-setting and characterization to work in this compact little saga of a rural sewing factory and the women bound by hard times to its ever-running machinery. Hood highlights the plentiful humor of her cast, and, in the face of a community tragedy, a humanity and warmth beyond all expectations.

Editorial Reviews

Seam Busters captures so much of what makes life good, of what the word community really means. It, too, delivers truth about the American way: people doing thingsall kinds of things, great and smallwith love.

Southern Literary Review

Seam Busters captures so much of what makes life good, of what the word community really means. It, too, delivers truth about the American way: people doing things all kinds of things, great and small with love. --Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review




Mary Hood has mastered the high wires of brevity and conciseness. Her deeply imagined characters speak as if they are offering their own true and often fabulous commentary on the book of life itself. Idgie, Dew on the Kudzu


Georgia novelist Mary Hood puts her fine gifts of scene-setting and characterization to work in this compact little saga of a rural sewing factory and the women bound by hard times to its ever-running machinery. Hood highlights the plentiful humor of her cast, and, in the face of a community tragedy, a humanity and warmth beyond all expectations. Dot Jackson, author of Refuge


Mary Hood busts the seams of the factory-broken farmers in Ready, Georgia, where the Diet Coke and the Bible are both open. When her son is brought back from A-Stan, Irene Morgan is straightening inseams. Everybody, also the Hmong, mourns and is folded into America today. Hood s fiction brings back Erskine Caldwell s realism and Marion Montgomery s compassion. Jan Nordby Gretlund, Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark


I don t believe Mary Hood is capable of writing an uninteresting sentence. She can say in three words what I can say in 160. Like all the great writers, Mary Hood has mastered the high wires of brevity and conciseness. Her deeply imagined characters in her novella Seam Busters, as in all of her writing, speak as if they are offering their own true and often fabulous commentary on the book of life itself. Pat Conroy, author of "The Death of Santini"

From the Publisher