The Mothers

Genre: Fiction

This is the story of Nadia Porter, who is seventeen years old and hurting. Nadia's mother committed suicide, leaving Nadia and her father on their own. Nadia soon falls for Luke who is the son of the pastor at her church, and the two get pregnant. Nadia ends the pregnancy (with Luke's support) and their relationship. Aubrey is one of those perfect girls, the kind who would never be the right fit for Nadia, but the two become fast friends and then best of friends. While Nadia goes off to college and then travels the world, Aubrey stays home and becomes deeply entrenched in the church. Aubrey and Nadia's lives become entangled in things other than friendship and will have to work through their pasts individually and then together. This story is told by a narrator and the "The Mothers" of the church.This is a story about friendship and love and learning that sometimes feeling empty is better than filling up the emptiness with people who are just not the right fit.

I tend to be a big picture person and I used to give myself such a hard time about missing details (specifically when I was in school or at work), but the older I get and the more people I meet, the more I realize that we could catalog people into details-people or big-picture-people categories, and I'm the latter. All that said, every once in a while I'll surprise myself and get suck in the details. Reading this book made me appreciate the importance of details. Here's the thing...I didn't love this book, although, the story line and characters are compelling and the writing was generally enjoyable. However, the setting just kept tripping me up. And that's odd, considering that the setting is "just" the background to the storytelling, but still, it was just off. This story takes place in southern California. There are some descriptions of the beach and ocean, but so much of the story revolves around the local church, Upper Room, and the story is narrated from its members's perspective. Every time the author mentioned that the characters were in California, I had to stop myself and re-jigger my inner "picture" of the location. And then I started with the inner monologue of, "Why do I keep thinking they're in the south?" and "There are churches all over the country, what is it about this one that keeps taking my mind to the south?" I don't know about you, dear reader, but if I let my mind float in the middle of a story, it's very hard to bring it back to center again (it has not escaped me, by the way, that the experience of reading or listening to a book is akin to that of meditating!). In my mind, this church and the traditionalist, critical, nosy, too tight-knit group of characters within it, belong in a small town in the south, but drop it in California and it just doesn't make sense.

This has never happened to me before. Anyone else experience this?