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    The Mothers: A Novel
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    The Mothers: A Novel
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    The Mothers: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Mothers: A Novel

    Written by Brit Bennett

    Narrated by Adenrele Ojo

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A dazzling debut novel from an exciting new voice, The Mothers is a surprising story about young love, a big secret in a small community--and the things that ultimately haunt us most.

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9780735288263
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Mothers

    4/5

    563 ratings60 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I love a novel where the character is flawed and surprises me. This page-turner is about loss, regrets, and the consequences of choices. I couldn't put it down and it still leaves me thinking. A powerful debut novel by Brit Bennett.
    • 5/5
      Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, focuses on a tight-knit African American community in San Diego. Seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner falls head over heels with Luke Sheppard, the local pastor’s son. While Nadia copes with her mother’s recent suicide and Luke struggles with an injury that ruined his future career in football, they find solace in each other. Meanwhile, Nadia’s new best friend, Aubrey, moves out of an abusive home and into the welcoming arms of the church. The novel is an ambitious one as it sweeps decades, reflecting on such controversial topics as religion, racism, and abortion.

      While the majority of the novel is told from Nadia’s point of view, every few chapters the narration diverts to first person plural, mimicking a Greek chorus. In this case, the narrators are the older mothers in the church chattering about the drama that unfolds around them. They consider themselves the moral authorities in the community, and they are quite vocal about what they consider to be right or wrong. Unlike a Greek chorus, they end up playing a more direct role in the plot, as their disparaging commentary ends up directly affecting Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey.

      The concept of motherhood plays a crucial role in the plot. When Nadia becomes pregnant with Luke’s child, she hides it from him and the rest of the community, as she knows she would be judged harshly whether she chooses to keep the baby or not. It is difficult to keep gossip from the mothers of Upper Room Chapel though, and Nadia’s secret becomes more tenuous as time goes by. Since love interests are few and far between in small communities, when Nadia goes off to college, Aubrey finds companionship in Luke. The love triangle that ensues defines much of the emotional strife that the trio endures for the decades to come.

      Bennett composes beautiful prose laced with strong metaphors. It is easy to get swept up in the moment, as her piercing descriptions force you to think about how people are perceived, and how one decision can affect those close to you in many different ways. As new revelations come and go, emotional investment will be inescapable, and you may even find yourself reveling in the forthcoming gossip as much as the mothers.

      The Mothers by Brit Bennett unveils a fresh new voice to the literary world. In masterfully crafted language, Bennett’s novel will ask you to question your prejudices and pre-conceptions, and you will more than likely acquiesce to her request.
    • 3/5
      I read this one because it was in a bag of pass-em-ons from a cousin. It sounded promising, but didn't quite achieve fulfillment. The title ostensibly refers to a group of older black church women who run a prayer circle (and probably pretty much everything else church-related) and act sort of like a Greek chorus, commenting on the action briefly and periodically throughout the novel. It also, however, serves to suggest the overall theme of women dealing with motherhood, their relationship TO their mothers, and their concept of themselves as mothers. There are elements of several great stories here, but as so often happens with first novels, I think the author tried to do too much. I mean, EVERYTHING is in here---teen pregnancy, abortion, infertility, infidelity, sexual identity issues, suicide, abandonment, parental and spousal disaffection... On the other hand, any suggestion of racial tensions is almost entirely missing, because there are virtually no white people in the story, except for one gay woman, who feels like she's there to fill the role. In fact, many of the characters feel like they are slotted in to satisfy a requirement, and the whole book has that "product of a good MFA program" feel to it. Much of the action happens off the page and gets summarized rather than visualized. There is too much distance between the reader and the actors; I kept an interest in what was happening to them, but I didn't care about them as I wished to. Characters' motivations are sometimes puzzling or simply non-existent; there's a lot of soul-searching after the fact, but nobody ever seems to contemplate the consequences of their decisions before making them, or learn the simplest of life lessons from their own or anyone else's mistakes. Everyone betrays everyone else in some way, not cruelly, but thoughtlessly. The Mothers isn't a bad book, by any means. It may even be a good book if you've been reading for 30-some years instead of 60-some years. I'm sure I'm getting harder to please with every book I consume, and, you know, YMMV.
    • 4/5
      In a beautiful, lyrical prose, Brit Bennett explores how the decisions made in our youth can affect the rest of our lives. The Mothers is about a teenaged girl named Nadia who finds herself pregnant while mourning the loss of her mother. Nadia’s mother took her own life and Nadia is left searching her memories for reasons why her mother would want to end her life, often blaming herself. “Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?” “There is nothing lonelier than the moment you realized someone had abandoned you.” Dealing with her grief, Nadia finds comfort in the preacher’s son, Luke. “Her mother died and she was drawn to anyone who wore their pain outwardly, the way she couldn’t.” Luke and Nadia begin an intimate romance until Nadia finds herself pregnant. “She’d been the type of foolish woman her mother cautioned her to never be.” Nadia decides that to have the life her mother wanted for her, she must have an abortion. “This would be her life, accomplishing the things her mother had never done.” Nadia has felt isolated from her old friends since her mother’s suicide and she begins a friendship with a girl named Aubrey. Aubrey is living with her sister, also a girl without a mother. Nadia: “She felt a secret kinship with a girl who didn’t live with her mother either.” “It was strange learning the contours of another person’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.” The two form a strong friendship and bring light and comfort into each other’s dark lives. Nadia’s father is “coiled up tight inside himself” with grief. Nadia can’t take “the silent, uncluttered rooms, the whole house open like a wound that would never scab over.” “At home, loss was everywhere; she could barely see past it, like trying to look out a windowpane covered in fingerprints.” Nadia can’t wait to escape and go away to college. Her whole life she is “always searching for the next challenge.” “She felt hungry all the time- always wanting, needing more.” As she grows up and travels her secrets remain sitting heavily on her shoulders. “Could you ever truly un-love a child, even one you never knew?”Meanwhile Luke can’t stop wondering about the life and baby he could have had with Nadia. It torments him. Luke felt like Nadia had gone on with her life, “like nothing had happened, but Luke was stuck, wedged in the past, always wondering what would’ve happened if they’d kept the baby.” He has an anger growing inside him. Do you ever get over your first love? “We have all known that little bit love. That little bit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last little bit as long as we could, and in our living, nothing has starved us more.”Does grief ever really end? “Grief was not like a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.”This book was lovely and so were the characters. I found myself rooting for their happiness and success.
    • 2/5
      Ugh. Irritating rubbish. Reactionary silliness about motherless daughters and the evils of abortion disguised as literary fiction. This started promisingly but devolved into some kind of Harlequin horseshit with one bad plot decision after another. My first big waste of time if 2017.
    • 3/5
      High schooler Nadia's mother commits suicide, and this novel looks at her life for the summer after, and how it affects her for the next 10 years.Her father is a former Marine, who had been based at Camp Pendleton. Nadia grows up in Oceanside, as the smart black girl at school. She meets her best friend Aubrey at church after her mother's death, and her first real boyfriend Luke as well.I found the story to be generally good, with a few holes )I wish more of the narrating was done by The Mothers!). For me, though, the best part's were Bennett's descriptions of SoCal. Of May gray/June gloom, of fire season, of Ladera Heights, of the beach and being black in a diverse place (as opposed to Nadia's experience being black in the very white Midwest). Bennett is clearly a Southern Californian.
    • 4/5
      The characters in this story were beautifully developed and what a unique and sad story it was! I liked it very much, but just wasn't in love with it. A thought provoking one for sure and it definitely makes you question the decisions you make early in life, and how those decisions always hang with you in some small way.
    • 4/5
      I keep flip flopping between wanting to give this book three or four stars. Decided to go with four because the book held my interest and that is always a good thing. Characters are often what keeps me liking a book but frankly I did not care for any of the characters in this book. In the beginning of the story the main characters are young so acting shallow isn't out of the ordinary but as the years passed the main characters remained shallow in most of their thoughts and actions. I think what bothered me most was that the characters never matured emotionally despite the book taking place over many years.
      The narration of the audio book was nicely done. The sections of the book that could be considered a bit sensitive were made softer by the soothing voice doing the narration.
      I did like the theme Mothers was blended into the story in numerous ways.
    • 3/5
      I found this book to be both emotionally moving and boring at the same time. Actions that Nadia, Luke and Aubrey take during their younger years reverberate for each of them a long time afterwards. The ending remains unresolved for all of these people, which normally bothers me in a book. In this case, it seemed appropriate.
    • 4/5
      Lots of emotional relationships woven into this story that were well written and rang true. However, I just felt like something was lacking, something didn't quite pull together. Still well worth the read.
    • 5/5
      I received this book for free through a complimentary Quarterly Literary Box. I really liked this book. First off, it is incredibly well written. It was such an easy read. Some books I find myself slogging through but I didn't with this book. Everything just flowed nicely and it was effortless to read if that makes any sense. The characters felt very real and dynamic. The author did a good job giving everyone's perspective. I loved the setting of San Diego and how it was incorporated.As for the abortion element, I thought it was handled well. I didn't take any issue with it. A little random but one of my favorite quotes was, "A girl's first time was supposed to hurt. Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman's life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne" (210). As soon as I read that I was like, Ain't that the truth! Overall, I was really impressed by this. It was an amazing debut novel.
    • 4/5
      Nadia Turner is still grieving the suicide death of her mother and is only 17 when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant by the pastor's son. A high school senior with a scholarship to the University of Michigan, Nadia knows that her future can only happen if she has an abortion, which she seeks out with Luke's financial assistance but without telling her father. Nadia leaves soon after, abandoning her best friend, Aubrey, and her father, in search of a new life. Years later, Nadia returns to her church family and friends to face her history and the secrets she left behind. Told by the church "mothers" from a third person perspective, this is a coming-of-age novel about choices and loss and the price paid for keeping secrets from the ones you love most.I really enjoyed this novel and it was a huge hit with our book club. It's a good book to debate the choices the characters made and other emotionally-charged themes, such as race, religion, and choice.
    • 4/5
      Nadia Turner, age 17, is still reeling from her mother's suicide, when she discovers that she's pregnant. The story then follows Nadia, her then-boyfriend Luke, and her friend Aubrey through the next several years of their lives, as they grow close, grow apart, discover each other & themselves, and make choices which affect not only themselves but each other. In the background are "The Mothers", a group of older women of the church who casually observe the happenings between these three main characters.It wasn't until I finished this book that I truly appreciated the title, for the word "mother" refers to many different people & situations throughout the story. I wouldn't say I loved this book, but I did enjoy it and found the writing impressive, especially for a debut novel. The ending was a bit abrupt and I found that somewhat disappointing, but the novel as a whole should yield good book club discussion.
    • 3/5
      A really different book from my experience. I never felt I really understood what was "in character" for each person (except for Luke's mother - she was painted quite accurately and easily identifiable in my world)

      I felt completely removed, as if flying above it all, seeing it happen but not really involved. In fact, that's how I felt Nadia approached the world in general. Monumental things would happen (things I would have considered monumental had they happened in my life) but they were a mere sentence or treated like an afterthought. I'm not sure if this was intentional to place focus on other situations for the sake of the story or if it was show Nadia's general emotional apathy.

      Was Aubrey supposed to be a sympathetic or pathetic figure? I'm not sure. She too handled situations strangely to how I would have, but I understood her motives more and basic truths.

      Perhaps that's the point. How well do we really know anyone, even when you've lived with them your whole life? This theme comes up a few times and my takeaway from the book is, "not really" and "certainly not much from these people". Yet, they were real, flawed people and for that, I really enjoyed reading this book.
    • 3/5
      Wow - judgement, hypocrisy, and double standards. Poor, poor Nadia - this girl (who never recovers from her mother's (spoiler alert) suicide) has everyone vilifying (and abetting) her choices without even a sliver of "Christian" compassion or forgiveness let alone acknowledgement that they are all complicit in her decision to have an abortion. Even Aubrey, who has plenty of her own secrets that she hides from her supposed "best friend" and husband can't muster ANY compassion for Nadia. Luke, a perpetually passive victim, recklessly rolls through life hurting everyone he meets because he lacks ANY moral center or backbone - oh the poor, has-been athlete. Just GROW UP, man! The parents are all malignantly indifferent to their children's troubles except how those troubles might affect them and their social positions, but oh, so quick to judge and disrespect their children's choices while demanding unconditional respect from them. At least everyone gets theirs eventually and they all live lives devoid of fulfillment and in willful denial of why they just can't be happy.
    • 2/5
      This novel starts out strong. I loved the mothers and their role as Greek chorus. I enjoyed the contrast in social stigma around sex and abortion for the male characters and for the female characters, which was reminiscent of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. But gradually things start to shift into a weird kind of soap opera world where sex and fate and infidelity are central, and the characters just keep saying the same things over and over again. The Greek chorus I loved so much disbanded into individuals and so lost the prophetic voice it had while speaking as a unit. And Aubrey...I like her, but she is such a Mary Sue.I appreciate the novel's commentary on race, particularly the difference in the racial and ethnic makeup of a Southern California city and a Midwestern college town and the self-congratulatory way that liberal, majority-white Midwestern colleges talk about their "diverse" populations, but the story just didn't do it for me.
    • 4/5
      This excellently written book is well deserving of a four-star rating. The setting is a coastal, small town California town. The church is the hub of the town.When one of the mothers commits suicide, she left behind Nadia, a bereaved 17 year old daughter, and a husband who is forever changed. Finding solace in the arms of a football hero, Nadia becomes pregnant, seeking an abortion, the football hero's parents, who are also the minister and his wife, pay the $600 for the surgery. Their choice that their son's reputation is more important than a life, will eventually find their shining lives tarnished. Years later, the congregation discovers that their minister is not as pious as he appears.The author takes us on a journey to walk with Nadia through her life and how the decision to abort a child haunts her, leaving her to wonder how her life would have been different if she kept the child.Finding a wonderful friend in Audrey, who also struggles with her mother's choices, Neither Nadia or Audrey can share what haunts them, leaving another choice that has long-lasting repercussions.More is a multi-layer story, superbly well crafted that explores the many ways in which mothers define who we are, leaving the characters of the book to explore how they are similar or different than their mothers. Complicated and riveting, this is one of the best books I've read thus far in 2017.
    • 1/5
      Awful, awful book. Basic premise is: have an abortion and you will be unhappy forever but keep the baby and you can hold on to your loser boyfriend.
    • 4/5
      This was a very powerful debut, and an enjoyable read. I would highly recommend this title to readers that enjoy character development rather than plot (i.e., Ann Patchett). I thought Brit Bennett's writing style is very similar to Emma Cline's - there are some truly beautiful sentences in this book. I look forward to reading more from this author!
    • 5/5
      At age seventeen, Nadia Turner, still reeling from her mother's shocking suicide, has a secret relationship with Luke, the pastor's son. She gets pregnant. She has an abortion. And the two go on with their lives. But a connection remains between them, perhaps, and neither of them can entirely keep from thinking about what might have been.This novel has gotten a lot of praise, and I think it's well-earned. The characters are well-drawn and believable, and situations that could easily have been melodramatic are instead handled with a light, deft touch. It also handles its touchy subject matter very well; there's no preachy authorial moralizing about abortion here, although the characters themselves are certainly allowed to have their own opinions. And I really like the writing. Bennett is capable of crafting a stunningly vivid and insightful turn of phrase when one is needed, and the rest of the time she just gives us beautifully clean prose that's smart enough to stay out of its own way. She also does some interesting things with POV that I wouldn't have expected to work anywhere near as smoothly as they do.
    • 5/5
      An introspective story that explores love, grief, longing, friendship, family, religion, faith, and community.
    • 4/5
      a look at abortion from many different sides. Not as completely pro as I"d like, but still more balanced than the usual.
    • 4/5
      The entwined lives of three teens in an African American community in Southern, California. Nadia, whose mother recently committed suicide and Aubrey, whose mother has chosen her boyfriend over jerk, and Luke, the pastor's son. Personal demons, young love, and growing up to find you still long for that which you, left behind. A decision impossible to take back but that will fill Nadia with regret.. the Upper Room chapel and the Mothers, those older church ladles, who seem to see and know everything. Gossip and opinions, they and Nadia are our narrators.I belong to a subscription service called Quarterly and every three months an author curates the box. Brit Bennett was the curator for this box and she included personal notes on stickiest, placed in various places in the book. Greatly added to my reading experience as she explains where she got some of her, some of her thoughts when writing. She based our narrators, the mothers, on the most judgmental, people she knew. If you read the book you will see what a great job she did.I was thoroughly drawn into this story, it felt so identifiable, so realistic and so true. The mistakes we make when we are young are sometimes hard to forget, fill us with regret, a longing to go back and change things. Of course we can't, we must learn to move forward as do the three young people in this novel. Quite a touching and memorable first novel.
    • 4/5
      Listened to the audiobook edition which had an excellent all-voices performance by Adenrele Ojo whom I've only otherwise heard in Justin Cronin's "The Passage" where she split the narration with others.I was engaged for most of it but the third-person gossipy commentary by "the Mothers" of the Upper Room Church Congregation that is used for the delivery of the conclusion felt rushed and distant. I wanted a closer first-hand knowledge of where the characters ended up. Still, that is a sign of good writing when you leave the reader wanting more.
    • 4/5
      A story unfolded through the telling of The Mothers, a Greek choir style of women. Nadia learns how to be a girl, a woman, from her church and family.
    • 5/5
      The Mothers are a group of older church women, a chorus of sorts. It is partially through their eyes that we see Nadia Turner, a high school student who recently lost her mom. When she starts dating Luke Sheppard, the pastor's son, it seems that she might settle down. But their relationship ends abruptly, Nadia leaves for the University of Michigan, and Luke marries her friend Aubrey. But the three friends are connected by secrets, which are gradually revealed in this well-written book. This is a book that had me stopping every few pages to capture quotes. This is a strong story, but it was the writing that really won me over. Here's a few quotes:"Black boys couldn't afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead." p. 60"A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We'll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle." p.64"Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?" p.67"Strangers often mistook them for sisters or cousins or even, Aubrey assumed, girlfriends. She was amazed by their ability to resemble each other, to become family, to occupy, at once, different ways to love each other." p.218
    • 4/5
      Two African American girls, two absent mothers, one boyfriend, one abortion. I liked the main characters and their points of view and their loving and contentious sisterly relationship, but the plot left me underwhelmed. It seemed to saunter rather than propel. The best part was the collective voices of the mothers of the Upper Room Chapel, always critical and less frequently supportive.
    • 4/5
      Read from July 10 to 20, 2016This is a story of three young people and how their decisions in youth follow them throughout their lives. It is refreshingly NOT set in New York, but instead Oceanside, CA. "The Mothers" are the female church elders and their collective voice guides us through the story. Though I wasn't a huge fan of this, I think the subtle coming-of-age story was great on it's own without the insight of The Mothers.Another mother connection, is the relationship between Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey and their own mothers. I would have liked to explore those relationships a bit more. While they each have their problems with their mothers, some of that is not as in depth as I would have liked (Nadia's mother's choice, for example).Overall, it was the dynamics between the three main characters that kept me reading. Once the relationship between Nadia and Aubrey blossomed, I was hooked.
    • 4/5
      Nadia Turner, the protagonist of this debut novel, is haunted by the suicide of her mother. As a teenager, she acts out, and gets pregnant by the son of the local pastor and subsequently is haunted by the abortion her lover and his parents push on her. Her friend, the straight-laced Aubrey, lives with her sister and her sister's wife, having escaped from a sexually abusive boyfriend of her inattentive mother.Does it sound excruciatingly Oprah-esque? There are touches of that, but the writing is good and the characterizations are mostly subtle. Besides the flawed and troubled mothers described in the story, the other "mothers" are a group of African American church ladies who act as a sort of Greek chorus commenting on the action in the book. I'm not sure those mothers added much to the work, but I may need another read-through before I decide.I liked Nadia because of her prickly independence and in spite of some poor decisions. I was a little put off by the emphasis on her abortion remorse, because while I know that some women feel that way, I also know that many women don't, and the lie that women are psychologically harmed by abortion is used against us by anti-choice forces.
    • 5/5
      I tore through this book and stand in total awe of Brit Bennett's fluid, effortless prose. Amazing.