Harrowing and stunning. The Mothers explores a tangled web of friendships, love, and lust in a small black community located in modern SoCal. Choices and consequences reverberate through the years of Nadia and Aubrey's joint coming-of-age. (Joint, yet also very different.) Bennett uses her beautiful writing to incisively nail the unfairness of being a woman and especially of being a black woman. Highly recommended. 
 {4.5 stars rounded up}