Sisterhoods and motherhoods are complicated affairs, filled with love and joy as well as chaos and betrayals. The Mothers by Brit Bennett is a book that shows these complex relationships by following the lives of three young African Americans and exploring how their connections with their mothers – biological, adoptive, or just the elderly church women who call themselves “The Mothers” – shape their futures in the wake of events from one eventful summer.
“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. But we didn’t. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the spring Nadia Turner got knocked up by the pastor’s son and went to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it.” – p. 2