Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION BEN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION BEN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | FICTION BEN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION BEN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The Mothers is a surprising story about young love, a big secret in a small community - and the things that ultimately haunt us most. It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, 17-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. 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.
Author Notes
Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. She has won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Brit is one of the National Book Foundation's 2016 5 Under 35 honorees.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bennett's brilliant, tumultuous debut novel is about a trio of young people coming of age under the shadow of harsh circumstances in a black community in Southern California. Deftly juggling multiple issues, Bennett addresses the subjects-abortion, infidelity, religious faith, and hypocrisy, race-head-on. At 17, Nadia Turner's life is topsy-turvy. Six months after learning of her mother's suicide, Nadia winds up pregnant and decides to abort the baby. The unborn baby's father, Luke-a preacher's son-gives Nadia the money to terminate but falls back on his promise to pick her up at the clinic after her appointment, causing a fissure in their relationship. Nadia's secret decision haunts her for decades-through college in Michigan, law school, and an extended trip back home to care for her ailing father. Meanwhile, the slow-to-build trust between Luke and Aubrey, Nadia's bible-thumping childhood best friend, who knows nothing of Nadia's past, is threatened when Nadia and Luke reunite and rip open old wounds after Luke and Aubrey's wedding. There's much blame to go around, and Bennett distributes it equally. But she also shows an extraordinary compassion for her flawed characters. A Greek chorus of narrating gossipy "Mothers" (as they're referred to in the text) from the local Upper Room Chapel provides further context and an extra layer to an already exquisitely developed story. Agent: Julia Kardon, Mary Evans Inc. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* California native Bennett's debut novel, set in the U.S. Marine Corps base city of Oceanside, unflinchingly examines the consequences of secret decisions born of pain and fear as they play out in the lives of three young people, decade by decade. The story is narrated in part by the eponymous mothers, a chorus of elder church women who having lived through it all demonstrate no compunction in judging and discussing the choices made by their fellow parishioners of the Upper Room Chapel. Seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner, beautiful, brilliant and broken by the recent suicide of her mother, hastily falls in love with Luke, the pastor's son, who is literally broken, having suffered a college career-ending football injury. An unplanned pregnancy followed by the decision to terminate ends their relationship as quickly as it began. Nadia befriends Aubrey, who is harboring her own deep, if unseen, wounds. Nadia's eventual escape from Oceanside ends when she returns to care for her ill father, and, inevitably, the secrets all three have been keeping from each other are exposed in an eruption as shattering as one would expect, with life-altering fallout. Bennett's writing is both wrenching and light. She deftly blends the complex and serious situations her characters face with innate humor and understanding in this deeply affecting coming-of-age story.--Szwarek, Magan Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ROGUE HEROES: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War, by Ben Macintyre. (Crown, $28.) An entertaining history of the S.A.S. from its North African desert origins. CITY OF DREAMS: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, by Tyler Anbinder. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35.) A richly textured guide to the past of the nation's chief immigrant city. THE MAN WHO KNEW: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, by Sebastian Mallaby. (Penguin Press, $40.) This thorough account of the former Fed chairman's rise depicts him as political to a fault. THE WORD DETECTIVE: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary, by John Simpson. (Basic Books, $27.99.) From a former chief editor of the O.E.D., a charmingly frank account of a career dedicated to lexicography. DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING, by Madeleine Thien. (Norton, $26.95.) A Chinese-Canadian professor probes the mystery of her father's life amid upheavals in China in this ambitious novel. AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: A Love Story, by John Kaag. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Kaag engages in a spirited lover's quarrel with the individualism of our national thought. THE MOTHERS, by Brit Bennett. (Riverhead, $26.) Three young people come of age in a black community in Southern California in this complex, ferociously moving debut novel. THE MORTIFICATIONS, by Derek Palacio. (Tim Duggan, $27.) This sweeping debut novel limns the exile and return of a Cuban-American family. RICH AND PRETTY, by Rumaan Alam. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $25.99.) An astute debut novel about two women's long but fraying friendship. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.
Guardian Review
A young woman struggles with the oppressive atmosphere of small-town conservative America T he Mothers is the first book from 25-year-old American Brit Bennett, who came to our attention for her 2014 essay " I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People ", a personal perspective lamenting the earnest nature of the self-conscious white anti-racist. But her first full-length debut isn't a personal take on current affairs; it's fiction. In an interview about The Mothers, she commented that "When you start a book with an abortion, you're starting with something that's ended, which causes certain problems in terms of the plot", but the opposite is the case for her protagonist, Nadia Turner. The novel begins the summer after Nadia's mother's suicide. A brief romance with the local pastor's son, Luke, leads to an unwanted pregnancy, and she's put in the position of considering a termination. The impact of her decision follows her for the rest of the book. That abortion could negatively affect a woman's life in the long term is a narrative usually reserved for the most rabid of anti-choice activists. The contentious issue surrounds the novel, and it's a credit to Bennett that it's dealt with so carefully in her narrative. Nadia doesn't want to be pregnant, so she has an abortion, and gets on with her life. But she doesn't pretend it never happened. The Mothers isn't explicitly feminist, in the same way that it isn't explicitly a novel about "the black experience". It makes all the points it needs to without being obvious. With the uncomplicated ease only a black writer can manage, everyone in the book is black unless described otherwise. Although Nadia's abortion is not easily compartmentalised, The Mothers is much more than a cautionary tale about teenage sex. Instead, we trace the coming-of-age journeys of three teenagers: Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey. Set in opposition to each other by their community (Aubrey is pious, plain and family-centred, while Nadia is hedonistic, disconnected and focused on education), Nadia and Aubrey are unlikely best friends. Approaching adulthood in a socially conservative black Christian community, each begins the novel feeling lost. Their lives are indelibly marked by trauma -- a mother's suicide, family abuse, and a career-ending sports injury. In the absence of their own mothers, they seek out a surrogate -- sometimes finding her in one another. Set in Bennett's native southern California, The Mothers perfectly captures the constraints of a small town, where anyone's business is everyone's business. Exemplifying that oppressive atmosphere are the watchful eyes of the community's mothers, who interject into the novel's events in a Greek-style chorus, ever judgmental. Through the words of almost every character in the novel are conveyed incredibly strong messages about guilt, shame, what is expected of women's bodies, and what happens when black women do not perform as they should. The Mothers ' black conservative Christianity is a punishing atmosphere for a girl to grow up in. With girls seen as the keepers of a family's reputation, Nadia bears the brunt of collective judgment well into her 20s. The differences in how she and Luke are treated are anger-inducing (although Luke deals with his own issues around masculinity). It is easy to feel frustrated by the actions of Bennett's characters, but these flawed, nuanced people stayed with me long after I finished the book, as I tried to work out the motivations for their behaviour. As 17-year-old Nadia escapes to college and moves on with her life, the people in her home town stay in the same place. Even though she is away for many years, we see very little of Nadia's later life; instead, the narration shifts back to the internal monologues of those she has left behind. Years later, Nadia is dragged home by a family emergency and finds herself squarely back in the community she's tried so hard to avoid, forced to tie up threads she has left hanging. In writing about Nadia's return, Bennett paints a picture of familiarity tinged with jealousy, and the conflicted emotions felt when everyone you have left behind has gone on with their lives without you. Her extended return makes for some of the best scenes in the book, as the characters grapple with things left unsaid. The Mothers is a beautifully written, sad and lingering book -- an impressive debut for such a young writer. - Reni Eddo-Lodge.
Excerpts
Excerpts
In the darkness of the club, you could be alone with your grief. Her father had flung himself into Upper Room. He went to both services on Sunday mornings, to Wednesday night Bible study, to Thursday night choir practice although he did not sing, although practices were closed but nobody had the heart to turn him away. Her father propped his sadness on a pew, but she put her sad in places no one could see. The bartender shrugged at her fake ID and mixed her a drink and she sat in dark corners, sipping rum-and-Cokes and watching women with beat bodies spin on stage. Never the skinny, young girls--the club saved them for weekends or nights--just older women thinking about grocery lists and child care, their bodies stretched and pitted from age. Her mother would've been horrified at the thought--her in a strip club, in the light of day--but Nadia stayed, sipping the watery drinks slowly. Her third time in the club, an old black man pulled up a chair beside her. He wore a red plaid shirt under suspenders, gray tufts peeking out from under his Pacific Coast Bait & Tackle cap. "What you drinkin'?" he asked. "What're you drinking?" she said. He laughed. "Naw. This a grown man drink. Not for a little thing like you. I'll get you somethin' sweet. You like that, honey? You look like you got a sweet tooth." He smiled and slid a hand onto her thigh. His fingernails curled dark and long against her jeans. Before she could move, a black woman in her forties wearing a glittery magenta bra and thong appeared at the table. Light brown streaked across her stomach like tiger stripes. "You leave her be, Lester," the woman said. Then to Nadia. "Come on, I'll freshen you up." "Aw, Cici, I was just talkin' to her," the old man said. "Please," Cici said. "That child ain't even as old as your watch." She led Nadia back to the bar and tossed what was left of her drink down the drain. Then she slipped into a white coat and beckoned for Nadia to follow her outside. Against the slate gray sky, the flat outline of the Hanky Panky seemed even more depressing. Further along the building, two white girls were smoking and they each threw up a hand when Cici and Nadia stepped outside. Cici returned the lazy greeting and lit a cigarette. "You got a nice face," Cici said. "Those your real eyes? You mixed?" "No," she said. "I mean, they're my eyes but I'm not mixed." "Look mixed to me." Cici blew a sideways stream of smoke. "You a runaway? Oh, don't look at me like that. I won't report you. I see you girls come through here all the time, looking to make a little money. Ain't legal but Bernie don't mind. Bernie'll give you a little stage time, see what you can do. Don't expect no warm welcome though. Hard enough fighting those blonde bitches for tips--wait till the girls see your light-bright ass." "I don't want to dance," Nadia said. "Well, I don't know what you're looking for but you ain't gonna find it here." Cici leaned in closer. "You know you got see-through eyes? Feels like I can see right through them. Nothin' but sad on the other side." She dug into her pocket and pulled out a handful of crumpled ones. "This ain't no place for you. Go on down to Fat Charlie's and get you something to eat. Go on." Nadia hesitated, but Cici dropped the bills into Nadia's palm and curled her fingers into a fist. Maybe she could do this, pretend she was a runaway, or maybe in a way, she was. Her father never asked where she'd been. She returned home at night and found him in his recliner, watching television in a darkened living room. He always looked surprised when she unlocked the front door, like he hadn't even noticed that she'd been gone. Excerpted from The Mothers by Brit Bennett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.