num_pages: 288
description: 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 romanceand the subsequent cover-upwill 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.
language: English
title: The Mothers
publisher: Riverhead Books