“Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.”
A mother and child is one of the simplest, and most complicated, of relationships. Whether you have a great relationship with your mother or not you are tied together through numerous connections. These interconnections of motherhood and all they entail is one of the main themes of The Mothers, the debut novel of Brit Bennet. Bennett is also the author of The Vanishing Half which I reviewed a few months ago, and it became a quick favorite. The Vanishing Half was published only a few months after The Mothers, a feat impressive for any type of creative individual. Now I finally was able to get my hands on her first book and see if her debut held up to her sophomore novel.
The title “The Mothers” references much, but primarily it indicates the key narrative voice(s) of the novel, the elderly church women of Upper Room Church in Oceanside, California. This sea-side setting is the home of the novel’s characters, Nadia Turner, Aubrey Evans, and Luke Sheppard. We are introduced to Nadia first, a bright, assertive, and confused high school senior who recently lost her mother. She begins a brief and covert relationship with Luke, the pastor of Upper Room’s only son, as she navigates her loss and the changes within her relationship with her closed off, former military father. Luke and Nadia’s relationship results in a pregnancy that the reactions to, and termination of creates a catalyst of pulling parts and coming together of their lives forever. Nadia’s unexpected friendship with Aubrey Evans bonds each girl to Luke, their own prospective relationships with their mother’s uniting them the summer following her abortion and before Nadia left for college. We follow Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey throughout significant pockets of time throughout their young adulthood, Nadia in college, Luke in physical rehab, Aubrey’s wedding, with the omnipresence of the church mothers splicing the stories together when they diverge. They provide a background wisdom that grounds the young adults’ choices into the web of life, empathising when needed, warning at other times, and often judging lightly.
As with The Vanishing Half, the collection of narrative voices Bennet crafts in her stories is one of the most enchanting qualities. The overlapping of voices allows Bennet to flesh out the world in a more organic way, and the voices of the various Mothers are reminiscent of the history of oral story-telling. In this way Bennet is not even subtly exploring the depth and weight of generations, and the continuation of the life cycle. These church mothers provide context beyond the structure of Bennet’s story, based in the harsh realities of African American women’s lives in America. Throughout the novel there are at least 3 generations of women we see as mothers, each of them a portrait of a mother that is framed within their individual circumstances. In fact one of Bennet’s key strengths is the way she channels not her own voice and vision, but the voices of those before and around her. Both of Brit Bennett novels left me wanting to be led back into the worlds of the characters long after the end. There is wisdom strung throughout The Mothers that isn’t present in just any good book, but a great one, and I’ll be watching the author eagerly as someone who is going places. I actually have to give this book back to my friend but part of me secretly hopes she and I forget, after all it makes a lovely blue covered addition to my shelf.
NOTE: It is important to mention before I end here that there are a lot of heavy topics within the book that are cause for trigger warnings, which will be listed in the following sentence. Trigger Warnings include: suicide, abortions, abuse, and rape. It is not always easy to read, and if you have trauma associated with anything listed please be careful and sensitive to your needs before reading.