Looking for a good book to pass the long January days? I just finished The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis and it was a beautifully written, powerful novel. I picked it up at Christmas because it was an Oprah's Book Club book and a "Heather's Pick", so I figured I couldn't go wrong - Oprah and Heather have never failed me in the past and this was no exception.
The emotional story of Hattie and her family is told over the course of 5 decades as a succession of narratives surrounding each of her eleven children and one of her grandchildren. It gripped me from the very first page, and I actually think I might read it again...it was that good!
If you're interested, here is an excerpt from the book cover (written much more eloquently than I ever could!):
"In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her first-born twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind...
Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis's The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last - glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing page-turner; a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream, Mathis's first novel heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction."
Are you convinced yet?
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