Brit Bennett was born and raised in Southern California, graduated from Stanford University, and earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review and Jesebel. You can find her on Twitter @britrbennett. You can find more of my reviews of Bennett's work here.
An urgent and provocative debut from an exciting new voice, The Mothers is a book about community and ambition, love and friendship, and living up to expectation in contemporary black America. It beings with a secret, then follows that secret through the lives of three different characters--from high school into adulthood--tracing its impact far beyond their Southern California youth. It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken seventeen-year-old beauty. She'll be the first in her family to go to college, if she indeed leaves home as she intends in the fall. But meanwhile, mourning her mother's recent suicide, she has taken up with the local pastor's son.Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, handsome but lacking direction, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables. They are young; it's not serious; they keep their relationship to themselves. But the secret that results from this romance--and the subsequent cover-up--will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides the truth from everyone, including Aubrey, her chaste best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults, still shadowed by the choices they made in their youth, and by the constant nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt. With her stunning first novel, Brit Bennett demonstrates a moving understanding of the human landscape, the way that betrayals and losses accrue and swell and ultimately shape whole communities. With wisdom, empathy, and insight, The Mothers asks whether "what if" can be more powerful than experience itself. Whether, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, and to the communities that have parented us.
This story is absolutely brilliant, and that has to do with Bennett's writing style for sure. Her writing never ceases to amaze me. It always draws me in. I'm enraptured by every sentence, and I never wanted to put this book down, even for a second. She tackles some of the hardest debates flawlessly, never providing an answer, but providing a guide map for conversation and for the way people feel after the hard choices. Her writing made abortion real to me, in a way I hadn't ever understood before. It made motherhood and community feel tangible, in a way that those nouns often feel broad and ungrounded. The way Bennett uses language is unlike something I've read before, which makes the story itself take flight in a way other novelists can only dream of achieving.
One of the best writing choices Bennett made for this book was the "we" narration at the beginning of each chapter. At first, I didn't quite understand who these omniscient narrators were, until the second or third chapter. When I recognized it for what it was, I fell in love with these Mothers, these narrators who were all knowing and yet blind in understanding. They were narrating Nadia's and Luke's and Aubrey's stories, but also they weren't because they almost lacked this compassion for the decisions and consequences they were suffering. The Mothers were the church Mothers that Nadia drives around near the end, but also when the final sentence hit me, I realized that the "we" were all the mothers that ever existed and that will continue to exist. The way this story is about motherhood is subtle in an overt way. Nadia is obsessed with finding her mother, Aubrey hopes to become a mother, and Luke is helped by his mother in the biggest possible way. Luke's mother helps Nadia like she thinks a mother should, and Aubrey's mother is the furthest from being a mother at all. These little exchanges can be glossed over all together, but the Mothers narrating the story brings them back into focus, highlighting how mothers are "inherently vast and unknowable" but also omnipresent and all-knowing.
Bennett writes about abortion in a way I've never seen before, and appreciated deeply. It brought the subject to a whole new light for me. Nadia made the decision to get an abortion because she saw her future ahead of her and didn't want the child. The way that decision haunted her for the rest of the novel was frightening and sad. She should have been able to make that decision for herself without having to be haunted and hunted the way that she was, but the reality of it is something that we needed to talk about, needed to hear according to Bennett. On the flip side, the conversation about men "not having a voice" in the matter about it is so intriguing. We focus, rightly, on the woman's choice because it is her body, that we often gloss over how men feel. Bennett included Luke's voice and brought his guilt, his sadness, his grief to light. At first it made me uncomfortable to feel like he deserved to be a player in the conversation, but as the story progresses and I saw how he was haunted by the loss of the baby, I wondered how many men out there had felt like this at some point. It's not to say that women are wrong for making the choice that they need and have a right to make; it's just an important part of the conversation to check how other people are affected and to make sure they get help or have the support they need. Bennett doesn't shy away from the brutality of choices throughout the novel--not that the choices are inherently brutal, but the way they affect or haunt people is, and that it's necessary to recognize that. It's a conversation I wouldn't have ever thought to have, and I'm so glad that Bennett shone lights on all the angles in The Mothers.
This narrative hurtles through time, that it's almost surprising to look back and remember that when we started, Nadia was seventeen and Luke was twenty-one. But it's not only the three main characters who are flying through life, but all the other characters as well. The Mothers seem both ageless and aging; Luke's parents stumble at the choices they make and are surprised when, so many years later, it comes back to haunt them as well. Even the unborn baby gets cameos where he is imagined at different stages of life, getting older just as fast as Nadia and the rest of them are. The way this story utilizes time as another omniscient player is stunning. Especially since the secret and decisions haunt the characters, which is only something that can happen after specific amounts of time pass. As the characters grow older, the writing shifts to reflect that effortlessly, which is why it's so surprising to remember that this story started when Nadia had only just graduated high school. You feel like you grew up with these characters and, like the Mothers, watched over them through that whole time period.
I hope Brit Bennett keeps on writing! She published The Vanishing Half in 2020, and you can find my review of it here!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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