A review by danilanglie
The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

2.0

Gosh, I feel really bad, but I just did not connect with this book very much. The writing was gorgeous, it had a very lush, rich texture to it almost, and I liked the way the POVs dipped into the heads of the different characters as the story progressed.

But... those characters, this story, it just felt all very academic and distant to me, in a strange way? I feel like when people who don't like literary fiction imagine what the genre is like, this book is exactly it: a pretty bleak story about inter-generational trauma and suffering, with a slow-moving plot.

I think the biggest disappointment for me in this book is that up until like the halfway mark, I thought this book was going to be about grandmother, mother, and son all coming together. I thought the book would be about Bonaparte. Those were the most interesting sections to me, and I kept waiting for Ava and Toussaint to finally go there and reunite with Dutchess. And that is a promise that the book never fulfills. Instead it just keeps building and building up to a tension point that doesn't really have catharsis, I guess.

So yeah. I can't deny that this book has a lot of gorgeous individual elements in it, but for me, it just didn't really hit the spot.