You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
While beautifully and bluntly written in places, this whole novel is a chore. I love a dark story and I love reading about struggle and I actually don't like happy endings. But all of Hattie's 9 children suffer - there is no joy, no hope. The small bits of happiness are so slight that it makes the whole story more depressing. Also, for a family with 9 children, they are so disconnected - I understand that a lot of that is due to Hattie but I just wanted to see more of their lives together rather than as separate chapters. Some very powerful writing here but I would have liked fewer stories that were more developed. It is a very quick read.
Left me wanting so much more
Beautiful story and beautifully written. I loved getting to know all of Hattie's children but one chapter wasn't enough because we are never really told where they end up in life. * Supplier Alert*Especially Ruthie who was given to Hattie's sister with the thought of her having a better life. Was it better? What was relationship with Hattie when she was older? Then there's Bell, sick with tuberculosis. Did she go to stay with her mother? Did she fully recover? The book ended too abruptly
Beautiful story and beautifully written. I loved getting to know all of Hattie's children but one chapter wasn't enough because we are never really told where they end up in life. * Supplier Alert*Especially Ruthie who was given to Hattie's sister with the thought of her having a better life. Was it better? What was relationship with Hattie when she was older? Then there's Bell, sick with tuberculosis. Did she go to stay with her mother? Did she fully recover? The book ended too abruptly
The writing is very powerful but I felt like the story couldn’t gain momentum because it was a chapter about each child. I wish I knew more about all of them instead of an in-depth treatment of a specific point in time of each child.
adventurous
emotional
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Beautiful writing on tragic events. I enjoyed this look at the same family over multiple decades through the lives of the children and their relationship to their mother, Hattie. The end was not what I expected, but it fit with the rest of the narratives.
Interesting stories of a black family during the Great Migration. I didn’t really ever get into it because it felt so disjointed. The individuals were engaging and their stories heartbreaking; but I didn’t really ever connect with any of them.
The Great Migration was such a critical period in American history, so I was intrigued with this novel that uses that moment as a jumping off point. In some ways, it read more like a series of short stories about different members of one family. Others have mentioned how dark this book is--I will certainly agree and wish there had been at least one hopeful tale. It had a strong start, but by the end, I was ready to move on.
Oprah’s latest book club offering from first time novelist, Ayana Mathis, is a family saga that follows the Shepherd family through five generations from 1925 through 1980. The story opens with 17-year-old Hattie, a recent arrival to Philadelphia during the Great Migration North from the terror of Jim Crow South, in a steamy bathroom trying to save the lives of her infant twins who are stricken with pneumonia. Despite their “names of promise and hope,” Philadelphia and Jubilee die, and Hattie is never able to get over her grief. Her soul withers and she becomes bitter and unloving, alienating her husband and the children to come (who, along with a grandchild, make up the twelve tribes). Hattie’s children spend much of their lives trying to tap into any compassion left in their mother, yet Hattie’s pragmatic view is that “What good would it have done to spend the days hugging and kissing if there hadn’t been anything to put in their bellies?” Hattie remains throughout the novel a flawed woman, angry and lacking in tenderness, but an unwavering force dedicated to her children’s survival.
Each chapter of the novel is devoted to one or more of Hattie’s children, and their journeys mirror changing aspects of the black experience in America. Mathis moves briskly from one story to the next, from Floyd who returns to the Jim Crow South as an itinerant musician wrestling with his homosexuality, to Bell stricken by tuberculosis and her memories of an affair with a kind man who had made her mother happy years before, to Franklin who stands watch on a beach in Vietnam, at war with his own demons, a marriage that fell victim to his alcoholism and gambling. The most realized portrait is of Six, who is weighed down by scars both physical and emotional. Six has so badly beaten a neighborhood boy that he is spirited off to Alabama to tour the tent revival circuit. Although the townspeople believe that the teenage Six has the “gift,” he believes that he is nothing more than a ruined instrument of God who finds that it “was only in church that he felt compassion for anyone beside himself.”
Mathis has a gift for showing how heavily history weighs on a family as despair brings down subsequent generations and dreams die a slow death. But the weakness in her book, along with some writing that at times is flat, is that the numerous strands of the plot fail to connect to one another. A chapter on Billups suggests that he was sexually abused as a child, but other chapters set in that time period give no indication that abuse occurred. Hattie reluctantly gave away her daughter Ella to her childless sister, Pearl, “as if she were a dog,” and we never hear about the girl or Pearl again. Characters appear and vanish and there is little sense that they belong to the same family. While Mathis has decided to opt for scope, something is lost when the reader is deprived of immersing himself in the characters who are never fully realized.
Each chapter of the novel is devoted to one or more of Hattie’s children, and their journeys mirror changing aspects of the black experience in America. Mathis moves briskly from one story to the next, from Floyd who returns to the Jim Crow South as an itinerant musician wrestling with his homosexuality, to Bell stricken by tuberculosis and her memories of an affair with a kind man who had made her mother happy years before, to Franklin who stands watch on a beach in Vietnam, at war with his own demons, a marriage that fell victim to his alcoholism and gambling. The most realized portrait is of Six, who is weighed down by scars both physical and emotional. Six has so badly beaten a neighborhood boy that he is spirited off to Alabama to tour the tent revival circuit. Although the townspeople believe that the teenage Six has the “gift,” he believes that he is nothing more than a ruined instrument of God who finds that it “was only in church that he felt compassion for anyone beside himself.”
Mathis has a gift for showing how heavily history weighs on a family as despair brings down subsequent generations and dreams die a slow death. But the weakness in her book, along with some writing that at times is flat, is that the numerous strands of the plot fail to connect to one another. A chapter on Billups suggests that he was sexually abused as a child, but other chapters set in that time period give no indication that abuse occurred. Hattie reluctantly gave away her daughter Ella to her childless sister, Pearl, “as if she were a dog,” and we never hear about the girl or Pearl again. Characters appear and vanish and there is little sense that they belong to the same family. While Mathis has decided to opt for scope, something is lost when the reader is deprived of immersing himself in the characters who are never fully realized.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infidelity
Moderate: Violence