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A Novel
by Ayana Mathis
Book Reviewed by: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.
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 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. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, 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.
Creating a larger social map, Mathis threads a fictional story with current events, such as the ongoing fight of rural black families in southern states to keep their ancestral land from developers and the suffering of the homeless. There is also mention of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's notoriously racist mayor, which adds gravity to Ava's story in its time and place. The plot, at times, is fraught with tension because of the impulsivity of its financially fraught characters. Nevertheless, the story is sensitive in the way a family story can be...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Ava Carson, the protagonist in Ayana Mathis's second novel The Unsettled, is homeless because of domestic violence. At the Glenn Avenue shelter, she can't sleep or eat. She is listless and emotionally paralyzed. Yet Ava never considers that she might have a traumatic brain injury.
Researchers who analyzed data from multiple countries, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Australia, found that 53% of homeless people experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in their lifetime.
A TBI occurs when the brain suffers a significant blow, often from a fall, a car accident, or a physically violent act. A moderate to severe TBI is defined by "falling unconscious for a minimum of 30 minutes following the ...
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Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend
The Unsettled crosses generations and landscapes, digs in the Southern soil and walks mean Northern city streets. Expansive and explosive, this beauty of a novel showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read.
