Review Tour + #Giveaway: Mama Tried by Kathy Des Jardins @KDJMamaTried @GoddessFish

Mama Tried

by Kathy Des Jardins

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction, Women's Fiction

BLURB:

Disc jockey Joy Faye Savoy plays country songs written about women like her mother, the comely, exasperating Quida Raye Perkins. When Joy treats her audience to good-natured gripes about her big-haired and bossy mother, who's known to hitch rides in semi trucks, she is shocked to find herself syndicated … with one catch—she must keep poking fun at feisty Quida Raye.

Joy makes the best of small-town stardom despite big-time baggage, a load not lightened by hunky co-workers or her overbearing best friend until true love strikes. Meanwhile, Joy finally hears in those old melodies what she and her mother have had in common all along—yesterday, with its shared memories of happiness and tragedy. And they know all the words by heart.

Mama Tried is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, KOBO, Scribd and other fine retailers.

Excerpt:

Joy couldn’t wait till Paul saw their place, a wonderland in yellow, beige, and brown, clunky with color-coordinated yard bric-a-brac and aswarm with pets—several dogs, assorted ducks. Joy even had a horse, though he was pastured five miles away. In other words, Paul was about to behold what every cent and all the credit an occasionally contrite if genetically combative E-Seven could scrape together.

“But when we pulled up to Joy’s place…” Boo- Boo began.

“Something was missing,” she said.

“There was the fence, the dogs, the ostriches, and so forth,” Boo-Boo said.

“They were ducks,” Joy told WildDog. Boo-Boo hunched his shoulders and shook his head, as if ducks made any more sense than ostriches.

“Anyway,” she continued, “in addition to the ducks, there was the cinderblock storage shed, freshly painted yellow and brown to match the brown fence posts and yellow bird bath.”

“I think there were even some yellow plastic flamingos still standing in the yard,” Boo-Boo recalled.

“Yellow?” WildDog wrinkled his forehead.

“My mother thought pink clashed with her yellow-and- brown color scheme,” Joy explained, as if that made sense.

“Everything was just the way it used to be,” Boo-Boo said.

“Except for one thing,” Joy noted, memory flitting once more across the unsettling what’s-different-about-this-picture sensation that gripped her as Boo-Boo pulled up to the driveway, Paul idling behind them. After studying the scene a few seconds and adjusting her depth perception by several degrees, it finally hit her. That wasn’t her trailer she was looking at. It was

the one parked behind her trailer.

“Her trailer was gone,” Boo-Boo said.

“Gone?” WildDog exclaimed.

“Poof,” Joy replied. “If you can imagine anything fourteen feet wide and seventy-two feet long disappearing into thin air.”

My Review:

I think that a lot of mothers and daughters could connect with the characters in Mama Tried. The characters and their stories could literally be plucked from among just about any one of our lives today. Mama Tried came to life right before my eyes as I could just picture the whole thing in my mind. The description made it so easy to do so.

Mama Tried tells the story of a mother and daughter’s relationship. The daughter never thought she was anything like her mother as with most of us until that day comes when you finally say or do something and we realize something about ourselves that we are like our mothers more than we ever thought or wanted to be.

Joy Faye Savoy is a disc jockey who has her own show and plays country music for a living. One day Joy tells a few stories about her mother Quida Raye Perkins and her audience loved it. From then on Joy has no choice but to continue saying things about her mother if she wanted to be a success.

I got the feeling that Joy may have had to be the parent for most of her life. Her mother is always showing up on her doorstep without any warning. She gets a kick out of showing up unannounced. She starts cleaning her house the moment she walks in the door even if it didn’t need cleaning.

Joy and her mom seemed more like sisters to me than mother and daughter with her mom trying to be the parent or the older sibling insinuating that Joy could never do anything right and that she was the only one who could do anything correctly. Always trying to take control of Joy’s life.

Even though Joy tried to take care of her mother as if she was the mother in lots of ways Quida Raye was the one who needed taking care of but Joy also needed her mother to be a mother to her.

If you like stories about mothers and daughters, a story that could be real then I do believe that you are going to fall in love with Mama Tried. Grab your copy of Mama Tried today!  

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Kathy Des Jardins owns a publications firm in metro Atlanta and is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club and Roswell Reads. A former newspaper reporter, columnist, and editor, she won her first journalism award for a country concert review. During the next decade, another category would dominate her nearly 100 national, regional, and state awards: humor writing. In addition to winning two Louisiana Press Association’s Best Regular Columnist Awards, four Louisiana Press Women Sweepstakes Awards, and a first for humor articles from the National Federation of Press Women, she was honored by the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Newspaper Contests and United Press International Newspapers of Louisiana, among other organizations. She has also received California Press Women’s Outstanding Excellence Award and USTA Georgia’s Media Excellence Award. Mama Tried, her first novel, revisits her two earliest, and most winning, themes: tragicomedy set to classic country music.

In addition to appearing in O, Georgia! A Collection of Georgia’s Newest and Most Promising Writers, she has written for several national and regional publications. Beginning in 2015, she also penned a book column for a monthly Atlanta magazine. Kathy claims dual citizenship, having been born in Kentucky and raised in Louisiana, where she fleetingly attended Louisiana State University-Alexandria and Louisiana College. She and her husband live in Johns Creek, Georgia, and have three sons.

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Giveaway:

$25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC

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