You know how some books take time to ease you into the story, developing characters and plotlines and then halfway through - or even at the very very end (I'm looking at you The Silent Patient!) they drop a bomb that makes the whole book explode?
The Mothers by Brit Bennett is not one of these stories.
The Mothers dives right into the hard, heavy stuff. Within two pages of reading, there is a suicide and a teenage abortion. I don't like to tell much about plot, because I hate hate hate book spoilers. But with that information being thrown at the reader within the first chapter, it's not much of a spoiler.
It doesn't let up the entire book.
Page after page these characters are dealing with their actions (both in the present and in the past) in the ways that seem so achingly human to me. We, as a species, do not act and feel in linear lines. We have waves of highs and lows, of feeling happy and sad, aware of how our actions affect others and focused so intently on ourselves that we forget to include the rest of the world. These characters changed and grew, but are always completely and totally themselves.
It wasn't an easy read, or a light read, but I think it was an important one.
I read this story on the kindle app on my phone and I took screenshot after screenshot of lines and ideas to remember and write down. Moments in the book that shouted out at me to listen to them.
A few of those lines:
"Like most girls, she's already learned that pretty exposes you, and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn't yet learned how to navigate the difference."
"Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full."
"magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting."
