As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance-and the subsequent cover-up-will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year- old beauty. "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." Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. If you don’t become them, even for a second, your prayer is nothing but words.A dazzling debut novel from an exciting new voice, The Mothers is a surprising story about young love, a big secret in a small community-and the things that ultimately haunt us most. You are Earl Vernon, washing dirty knots out of our strung-out daughter’s hair. You are Cindy Harris’s husband, searching your wife’s phone. You are Tracy Robinson, burning for whiskey. You close your eyes and listen to a request. More than just a notion, taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don’t even know. But prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. A man must’ve come up with that term – men think anything difficult is war. We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors”. He just came to sit with them while they weren’t. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. He understood sickness better than anything else.
It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. There was nothing lonelier than the moment you realised someone had abandoned you. It wasn’t hard to move into someone else’s life if you did it a little at a time.
You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip. Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. Her stomach leapt, like she’d missed a stair.
Shouldn’t someone look different once you’ve caught them in a lie, once you’ve seen them truthfully for the first time? A man who laced his fingers through yours all night and held your feet when you were sad had to love you, at least a little bit.
0 kommentar(er)
