Her husband is a hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing scoundrel, but she can't resist him in the bedroom. The absence of Jim Crow laws allows her greater dignity and freedom from fear, but financial success eludes her. In 1923, Hattie moves to Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration, when many Southern black people moved north hoping to escape abuse and poverty. She seems to write from a place of understanding the hearts and minds of a people whose history offered them limited options, often resulting in self-destructive behaviors. Hattie is the only character we can connect with throughout the entire book, and often that connection is from a distance.ĭoes this mean I didn't enjoy the book? No. Instead of a novel, it begins to feel like a series of interconnected stories, with one or two characters binding them all together. You get "Philadelphia and Jubilee" in 1925, followed by "Floyd" in 1948, then "Six" in 1950, and so on. Each character has to be introduced and developed within the space of one long chapter, never to be heard from again (mostly) once their time in the spotlight has passed.Īdding to the discontinuity are the long time gaps between chapters. Each chapter is devoted to one or two of Hattie's children, and after they get that one chapter, they're mostly abandoned for the remainder of the novel. How am I supposed to rate this? There's some powerful writing here, but the structure of the novel prevents it from gaining much momentum. An emotionally transfixing page-turner, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream, Mathis’s first novel heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.Īw, hell. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.īeautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last-glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.
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