A review by angelayoung
The Mothers by Brit Bennett

5.0

The Mothers, a group of Senior Church Women, aren't very good at mothering their flock, they're better at busy-bodying and gossiping and not-helping. They stand as metaphor for all the other mothers in this book of secrets and betrayals and loss. The protagonist, Nadia Turner, and her best friend, Aubrey Evans, are motherless for different reasons. And Nadia becomes unpregnant - a beautiful and desperately poignant word Brit Bennett employs for her protagonist's childless state. The state of not being a mother permeates this novel like rising mist.

A couple of quotes, Nadia first:

She still searched for clues, for strange things her mother had done or said, for signs that she should've noticed. At least then, her mother's death would make sense. But she couldn't think of any hints that her mother had wanted to die. Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

and

Before leaving [the free pregnancy centre], Nadia had thrown up quietly inside the clinic bathroom. Then she'd dumped the pamphlets in the trash, shoving all of them through the narrow slot until she reached the card on the bottom, the one attached to the baby feet. She had never seen such a thing before - a pair of disembodied feet - and maybe the sheer oddness compelled her to keep the pin. Or maybe she had known then that she would have an abortion. ... when she hadn't been able to throw the pin away, she knew that there would be no baby, that this pin was all that would remain.

And about Aubrey who, after difficulties, does finally get pregnant with her husband, Luke, who was the father of Nadia's unborn child:

[Aubrey's] stomach curved like a beach ball over her maternity pants. She was pregnant in a way that Nadia had once feared, in the days following her pregnancy test she'd lifted her shirt in front of the mirror and stared at a flat stomach that ballooned in front of her eyes until it hung immovably over her jeans. [And when listening, or not listening, to the clinic's instructions years before, Nadia] Didn't need to listen to know that she didn't want to be heavy with another person's life. But Aubrey didn't look scared. She seemed comfortable in her big sweater, a hand resting on her stomach, as if to remind herself that it was still there. She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting.

The Mothers is a haunting novel, a novel that set me thinking about mothering and not-mothering and precious life: life ended, life not begun, attempts made on life and, eventually, life allowed to spark and, with any luck, flourish. As I said, haunting.