My book club book seems to be an anti-abortion screed....

[LisaM]

5. It's not a particularly well-written book anyway.....

it's the usual kind of book that passes for literature now, where the character development is non-existent and the people all seem totally passive and victims of circumstance - look, I get that we aren't all dealt the same hand, but in the last 20 years or so, characters in books have been dumbed down so much that they sound like test cases in an article out of "Psychology Today".

The main character's mother committed suicide before the book begins. Her absence of character is really the largest character in the book, but the (young) author elected to take out the mother's backstory for no reason that I can fathom. Even the mother's death is informed by this abortion that takes place about nine months after she dies.

I want to cut the author some slack because she's so young, but then I think about a book like "This Side of Paradise", written when Fitzgerald was younger than Brit Bennett, and, as flawed as TSOP is, the characters still jump off the page about 100 years later.

Not so in "The Mothers".