It’s only when a family emergency brings the three together again do we see their real trauma is not the past, but learning to live with the past’s messy, unresolved hurt as a permanent part of their world. But Bennett takes these isolated events and brings them together at a crossroads with a single action that connects and forever changes all of her characters’ lives: Nadia’s painful decision to end her unwanted pregnancy.Īs the years spiral away from this moment, Aubrey, Nadia, and Luke each grapple with what they truly want-and need-to fill the absence in their lives: ambition, education, family, love. Then there’s Aubrey, the pious teen saved by the very church Luke’s father oversees, who becomes friends with Nadia.ĭeath, injury, and spiritual salvation: each of these alone is a major turning point in anyone’s life. In this way she meets Luke, a pastor’s son who is waiting tables after a football injury devastated his plans for a sports career. High school senior Nadia has just lost her mother to suicide, and spends the days riding different buses all over her California coastal county to avoid her father’s grief at home. But the three individuals at the center of THE MOTHERS, Brit Bennett’s bestselling debut novel, have already experienced hinge moments before the end of chapter one. The plots of these coming-of-age tales often center on a major event that drastically alters a character’s current situation and expected future: a loss, a change of perspective, a victory. I feel like every other book I read uses that descriptor.
The phrase “coming-of-age” is frequently thrown about in the book world.
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