The Unsettled A novel by Ayana Mathis

 Book Excerpt:

"From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival

"[A] powerful book.” —Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia in 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.

Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Although their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, Ava can't forgive her sharp-tongue, larger-than-life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger.

Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. 

Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance.

As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother, the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever-increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright if only he can find his way there. 

Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.

Title: The Unsettled
Author: Ayana Mathis
Publisher: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor
Reviewed By: Arlena Dean
Rating: Four
Review:
'The Unsettled' by Ayana Mathis

My Sentiments:

'The Unsettled' was quite an engaging powerful epic and pulsing read that the reader will have to keep up with all that will be going on in this story. "A searing multi-generational novel set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama...about a mother [Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint] fighting for her sanity and survival." Be ready for a story about racism and misogyny.

We find Ava trying to make a better life for her son, but we also see the disruption of her dreams with characters coming in and out making it impossible for her dreams. What will happen when Ava's first love Cass and the three move on attempting to find a place to settle? You, the reader will have to pick up this read to see how that comes out.

The author gives us a read that is told through 'dual POV's, third person around Ava's lie, and first-person through her mother, Dutchess.' This was a good read if you can keep up with what is going on with who, 'especially with the main characters are all complex and believable as are the situations in which they find themselves and from which they may or may not be able to extricate themselves.'

Be ready for quite a heavy read with some of the topics that are covered in the read of multiple generations and themes that deal with the contrasts of 'mother/daughter, mother /son, and man/woman all giving us a story of family trauma of these unsettled lives.'

Thank you to Net Gallery for a free e-copy of this novel.