“Nadia Turner, a seventeen-year-old Oceanside Black church-community girl in the months after her mother's suicide, has a secret pregnancy with the local pastor's son.”
What's in this book
- Brit Bennett's 2016 debut - a seventeen-year-old in a Black Oceanside church community has a secret pregnancy with the pastor's son
- Canonical contemporary American literary debut of the 2010s; structural predecessor to The Vanishing Half
- 288 pages of close-third-person Nadia narration across the decade after her mother's suicide
- The Upper Room Chapel "mothers" serve as choric narration
- Adenrele Ojo audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of The Vanishing Half, Homegoing, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and contemporary American literary fiction
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The Mothers is Brit Bennett's 2016 debut novel, the structural predecessor to The Vanishing Half (2020) and one of the canonical contemporary American literary debuts of the 2010s. The structural premise is Nadia Turner, a seventeen-year-old Oceanside (the fictional Black church-community town in Bennett's California where most of The Vanishing Half is also set), navigating the months immediately after her mother's suicide. Across the summer before college Nadia begins a relationship with the local pastor's son Luke Sheppard. A pregnancy results. Nadia chooses to terminate. The novel runs the next decade across Nadia's college years at the University of Michigan, her relationship with her best friend Aubrey Evans (who Luke eventually marries), and the slow accumulation of consequences from the choices the summer initially produced.
Bennett's structural method is the patient close-third-person Nadia narration across the entire decade, with the older church-community women ("the mothers" of the title - the Upper Room Chapel ladies whose communal voice serves as the structural choric narration of the novel) providing the structural moral framework and the operational social context the rest of the novel inhabits. The Aubrey subplot in the middle third (Aubrey's eventual marriage to Luke, the resulting structural tension with Nadia, and the slow revelation of what Aubrey has been carrying from her own childhood that Nadia has not known) is the structural emotional engine of the back half. The novel's structural argument (that the contemporary Black church-community small-town American novel requires the kind of patient communal-voice construction that the broader contemporary American literary fiction has not historically committed to at this scale) is made through the texture of "the mothers" themselves rather than through any direct argument.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Bennett entry point for readers coming to her work before The Vanishing Half, and as the canonical contemporary American debut novel on the Black church-community small-town American literary tradition. Read The Vanishing Half (2020) next. The Adenrele Ojo audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked The Mothers
The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 2020 review. Identical twin sisters from a small light-skinned Black Louisiana town diverge in the 1960s: one returns with her daughter, the other passes for white in California. Bennett's second novel and one of the canonical 2020s American literary novels.
Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng 2017 review. Two Shaker Heights families collide over the adoption of a Chinese-American baby. The novel that established Ng as one of the major contemporary literary fiction writers of her generation.
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 2016 review. Seven generations of two half-sister bloodlines, one in Ghana and one in America, from eighteenth-century Fanteland to present-day Stanford. Gyasi's debut and one of the canonical contemporary American diaspora novels.
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead 2019 review. Two boys at the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in 1960s Florida, based on the real Dozier School. Pulitzer Prize 2020 and the canonical contemporary American novel on institutional violence against Black children.
Transcendent Kingdom
by Yaa Gyasi
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 2020 review. A Stanford neuroscience graduate student runs reward-circuit experiments on mice while her Ghanaian-born mother lives in her apartment. Gyasi's second novel after Homegoing.
Hello Beautiful
by Ann Napolitano
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano 2023 review. Four sisters in 1980s Chicago and the graduate-student basketball player who marries into the family. Napolitano's breakout literary commercial novel.
More by this author