Book Review: The mothers - B. Bennett

 

After the first few pages I almost abandoned this novel, finding it quite slow and difficult to follow. However after the first third, I really liked this book, how loss and friendship and love are so interconnected in Nadia. The "what if" remains constantly with her during the years and in part defines her as a person and as a woman.

I found fascinating the church setting, a very closed group, where "the mothers", in other words the old women, keep an eye on everything and everybody and in equal part they judge and they nurture, they blame and they forgive.

The mothers is a very depth novel about becoming an adult in a semi protected environment, where, however, a lot of tragedy happens. It is about Nadia' s strength of character and her way to survive her losses. 

A very good read, interesting and compelling. I found the writing style a bit difficult then the mothers were "talking", the slang was not that easy for me to understand, but otherwise the style is smooth and well paced.

I would surely recommend it.

Overall rating:  7,5     Plot: 7,5     Writing style: 7      Cover:  7

Title: The mothers

Author: Brit Bennett
Publisher: Riverhead
Pages: 288
Publication year: 2016

Plot:

It's 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 manoeuvre, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: what if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt. 

The Author:
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later 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 is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.