The Mothers, Brit Bennett
The Mothers, Brit Bennett
31 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
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The Mothers

Author: Brit Bennett

Narrator: Adenrele Ojo

Unabridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 10/11/2016


Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 

“Bittersweet, sexy, morally fraught.” –The New York Times Book Review

"Fantastic… a book that feels alive on the page." –The Washington Post

From the New York-Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half, the beloved novel about young love and a big secret in a small community. 

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.

About Brit Bennett

American author, Brit Bennett, was born and raised in Southern California. She graduated from Stanford University, then earned her M.F.A. from University of Michigan. She was also an attendee of Oxford University. Quite a prestigious educational background for this author.

Her first work that garnered attention for Bennett was her essay for Jezebel entitled, "I Don't Know What to do With Good White People". That essay generated over one million views in three days. She has had other essays featured in The New Yorker. The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review.

Her debut novel was The Mothers, which was a NYT best-seller. Her second novel was The Vanishing Half, which was also a NYT #1 best-seller.

Bennett has received awards from different groups throughout her career for her fiction genre. She has also published important non-fiction essays.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kat on June 28, 2020

hell to the yeah!! so much complexity all wrapped up in such a tiny package, and with a riveting story too. hard to believe this was a debut, tbh.......more

Goodreads review by Roxane on June 26, 2016

The Mothers is an outstanding, engaging debut novel. The story follows two teenagers, Nadia and Luke, who fall in love as teenagers and how they come together and fall apart over the years. This is also a novel about a community and a church community and a friendship between Nadia and her best frie......more

Goodreads review by karen on February 24, 2021

looking for great books to read during black history month...and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the month, and i hope they will find new readers! *a mother's day float!!! for mothers!!!* i saw a comment the other day on a friend's review that was both amusi......more

Goodreads review by Jill on October 31, 2016

It’s never easy for me to be the lone dissenting voice in a chorus of much more respected reviewers who have lauded The Mothers as one of the finest books of 2016. Yet for me, this debut novel is a classic example of “the emperor has no clothes.” The book focuses on three teens: Nadia, whose mother......more

Goodreads review by Will on February 12, 2025

A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain’t shit and by then it might be too late. We were girls once. It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an aint-shit man, long as you get it out of your system good and ea......more


Quotes

"Brit Bennett is the real thing. The Mothers is a stellar novel — moving, thoughtful. Stunning. I couldn’t put it down. I’m so excited to have this brilliant new voice in the world."  –Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming  and Another Brooklyn

"Brit Bennett's masterful debut is brimming with unforgettable scenes and the sort of keenly-observed, precise language that makes you look at your own relationships anew. Told with the wisdom of a seasoned, compassionate storyteller, The Mothers is a novel about community, friendship, grief and growth. The two women at the center of this novel are characters you will find yourself thinking about long after you've turned the last page-- they pull you in close and never let you go. Bennett is a brilliant and much-needed new voice in literature." –Angela Flournoy, author of National Book Award-finalist The Turner House
 
"Brit Bennett’s The Mothers is a brilliant exploration of friendship, desire, inheritance, the love we seek, and the love we settle for. It is the kind of book that from its first page seduces you into knowing that the heartbreak coming will be worth it." –Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

"Brit Bennett’s The Mothers is an engaging and assured debut novel of depth, and introspective power. It succeeds as a brilliant study of a modern black woman, and as a lyrical and majestic portrait of her place in society." —Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen

“Brit Bennett is so bracingly talented on the page. . . [The Mothers is] astute and absorbing and urgent.” —Jezebel

“This book is something special: sage and sad and spectacular. This is a book about how the choices you make, and those made for you, shape the lovely, hopeful tragedy of your life.” Bookriot

“A wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses.” —Kirkus