Brit Bennett - The Mothers

Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.
"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."
It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.
In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.

Comment: I got this book at the library. I had heard many good things about the author's second novel, which I have not read yet, but when I saw this one available, I decided I wanted to try it.

I will include some spoilers.

In this story we meet Nadia, Luke and Aubrey, who all live in California, and when the story begins, Nadia's mother had recently committed suicide. This clearly affected her daughter and she started behaving differently, not as dedicated to the church nor the community anymore, but things only really change when she and Luke start dating. Well, more hanging out in fact, and then Nadia becomes pregnant and considers having an abortion. As they deal with their decision, the secret of what they did affects them but also those around them, until Nadia starts college on the East Coast. As the years go by, their lives move on towards different paths, but is their secret hidden that well? And what about the fact Aubrey, who is Nadia's best friend but who knows nothing about the abortion is now going to marry Luke?

As I've said, this is the author's debut, which was praised immensely when it was published, but then the author wrote another book which seems to have been received even better. I have heard enough about the author to recognize her name on the cover and decided to read it so I could see what the fuss was about. I must say that, while the writing style and narrative choice are clever choices, the content just didn't interest me that much.

The setting is a Black community in California and the story is partly narrated by the mothers of the title, a collective group of women, who seem to know what happens and there are several passages with the "we", which is really not that common. Then, there are also parts where the narrator is the more traditional singular third person, but I didn't mind this and found the switch obvious enough to make it easy. The tone is interesting, I've seen some readers comment that the "we" seems judgmental, slightly critical, as a way to expose the flaws or the difficulties the teenagers faced, but I didn't see it that way, and was more focused on the writing style, rather than the moral message.

Differences and novelties aside, the plot of this book was a little annoying to me because I agree with the readers who said the characters show no real growth from their experiences. I think that between this and the fact the story jumps in time without any graphic evidence (such as a simple division in parts or something), makes the change so indistinct that I didn't immediately realize the characters were older. This did put me off a little, true, but I'd say the real issue is that I just didn't like Nadia nor Luke and I feel they learned nothing from what happened to them.

I suppose today's society lives in a very numb way, it's as if any situation is so common, it's so mundane that however people react it's not a big deal unless for context, as described in this book. This community seems to live faith and values very closely, Luke is even the son of a pastor, and there is some talk about appearances and genuine behavior, and then Aubrey is a good girl, a churchgoer and does many good deeds and such, I think the contrast to Nadia is a little too obvious, but I guess that the point was precisely that.

The big secret is no secret after all, I think, because Nadia does choose to have an abortion and Luke isn't there to pick her up afterwards, as promised. This put them at odds, at first because Luke thought his part was done - giving Nadia the necessary money - but it turns out he would have preferred her to have the baby... well, that is what I got from the whole talk on the subject. I also think the obvious pro-life content was the real goal the author might have aimed for with this story, but I confess I can't tell if it's that intentional or if it's only a radical opposition to Nadia's choices for her body and what not having an abortion would have meant to her life.

They are teenagers when they go through this, then at some point, the next chapter is with them already older, having different lives, although Nadia keeps thinking about (regretting?) her choice. Somehow Aubrey, who is still Nadia best friend despite the geographical distance, gets to spend time with Luke after he decides to help more at church, and they plan on getting married. The author went the opposed way now, and they have a very traditional type of relationship, to the point they aren't intimate until their wedding day. I thought, is the secret's reveal going to be the big climax of the story, but things got muddled when Nadia attends the wedding and.. well, some stuff happens.

Until this point, I was already convinced this was not going to be a book I'd think fondly of, but I was still seeing it positively. But then, Nadia, Luke and even Aubrey act in a way that is so... juvenile and reveals their inability to grow up and understand what maturity is supposed to be, preferring to rehash their old errors and I was really annoyed. What was the point of the story after all, of going through all that? I was already irritated over their reactions about a choice which was supposed to be mutual, not that those reactions weren't valid, but that they were used to convey the teenagers' confusion and such. Now, as adults they keep behaving in ridiculous ways?

I think that, in part, the issue might be how the author decided to write this. The elements I liked so much and that seemed interesting in the beginning only got worse as the pages went by, and the characters lacked more and more depth, the more I read. Of course, this can be my problem, but with so many serious and life changing subjects to discuss/use in this story, the execution ended up very poor, in my opinion.

I still hope that I got this impression because it was a debut, and the second book will be as great as so many more readers say, and that I will enjoy reading it more than I did this one.

Grade: 4/10