Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.

When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.

Recommended for both adult and teenage readers.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. “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.” Far from reliably offering love, protection, and care, in this book, the mothers cause all the trouble.Ī wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses. Nadia tries to escape the clutches of small-town drama by attending college and law school across the country, but when she returns home to care for her ailing father, she finds herself enmeshed in unfinished business. This decision creates a web of secrets that endures for decades-though the ever watchful, ever gossiping Mothers never stop sniffing around and suspecting. More trouble awaits when Nadia discovers she's carrying Luke’s baby and decides not to keep it. The three teenagers are drawn together by the damage they have already suffered: Luke’s promising football career was ended by a terrible injury Aubrey has moved away from home to escape abuse by her stepfather.

Since then the girl had earned a wild reputation-she was young and scared and trying to hide her scared in her prettiness.” Bennett’s debut novel tells the story of this grieving 17-year-old girl, Nadia, her best friend, Aubrey, and her boyfriend, Luke, told partly by Nadia and partly by a chorus of eponymous “Mothers,” the church ladies of Upper Room Chapel, where Luke’s father is the pastor. She lived with her father, a Marine, and without her mother, who had killed herself six months earlier. The tangled destinies of three kids growing up in a tightknit African-American community in Southern California.

Butterball by Brit Bennett