To say that I like that novel would be an understatement.
And then came the advent of The Vanishing Half. After reading a few chapters I set aside thinking that it was not for me. The first time I picked up The Mothers was back in 2017. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.” Nadia decides to have an abortion, accepting money that Luke gives her without questioning its source, a secret that burns through the rest of the novel.“Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. Nadia's own mother had her when she was 17, and Nadia wonders if abdicating her dreams to raise her daughter might have been the root of her unhappiness. The summer before Nadia will head off to the University of Michigan, she begins sleeping with Luke, a football player who had gone to "a real university, not the community college where everyone loafed around a few months after graduation before finding jobs." Luke gets Nadia pregnant. None of these dear people will emerge from it unhurt.
Aubrey's mysterious past trouble has left her "skittish, like a delicate bird landing on your knee."īennett renders each of these characters vividly and without judgment, and sets them loose in a story that pits their desires against each other.
Finally, there's Aubrey, a sweet young woman who arrives in Oceanside after fleeing her mother's household to live with her sister and her sister's girlfriend. There's Nadia's father, a grief-stricken ex-Marine Luke Sheppard, the 21-year-old Nadia sets her sights on, who happens to be the son of The Upper Room's pastor and the pastor's formidable wife, known as the first lady.
Bennett gracefully segues back and forth from the conjoined voices of the church ladies to an omniscient that brings the reader close to the perspectives of this novel's other rich, nuanced characters.
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