Episode 476 || Into the Backlist, Vol. 3
This week on From the Front Porch, we have a new episode series: Into the Backlist! Today, Annie changes her focus from new releases to dive into the backlist: the books that came out years ago, the books that didn’t get enough attention, the books you may stumble upon while browsing in an indie bookstore like The Bookshelf.
To purchase the books mentioned in this episode, visit our website (type “Episode 476” into the search bar and tap enter to find the books mentioned in this episode) or or download and shop on The Bookshelf’s official app:
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Ensemble by Aja Gabel
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Annie would put The Mothers on a shelf with these books:
Revival Season by Monica West
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson (unavailable to order)
The Color of Water by James McBride
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com.
A full transcript of today’s episode can be found below.
Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.
This week, Annie is listening to Funny Story by Emily Henry.
If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, tell us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also support us on Patreon, where you can access bonus content, monthly live Porch Visits with Annie, our monthly live Patreon Book Club with Bookshelf staffers, Conquer a Classic episodes with Hunter, and more. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch.
We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.
Our Executive Producers are...Jennifer Bannerton, Stephanie Dean, Linda Lee Drozt, Ashley Ferrell, Susan Hulings, Wendi Jenkins, Martha, Nicole Marsee, Gene Queens, Cammy Tidwell, and Amanda Whigham.
Transcript:
[squeaky porch swing] Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South. [music plays out]
“She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn't want was a haunting.” - Brit Bennett, The Mothers
[as music fades out] I’m Annie Jones, owner of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and this week, we’re back with an installment of our podcast series Into the Backlist. Before we get started, a thank you to everyone who’s been leaving reviews for From the Front Porch. iTunes reviews and ratings are how new listeners can best find out about From the Front Porch and — as a result — find out about our indie bookstore, too. Here’s a recent review:
Favorite Podcast
I’m a huge fan of the Bookshelf and love listening to the bookish conversations and getting a dose of the South in every episode.
Thank you so much! If you haven’t left a review, all you have to do is open up the Podcast App on your phone, look for From the Front Porch, scroll down until you see ‘Write a Review’ and tell us what you think. Your reviews help us spread the word about not only our podcast, but about our small brick-and-mortar business, too.
[00:01:33] Now, back to the show! Because From the Front Porch is a podcast very much wrapped up in the comings and goings of our indie bookstore, many of the books we feature are new — or many times not-even-yet-released — books, which means backlist titles (books published more than a year ago) can get lost or overlooked. As I began to think about podcast episodes for 2024, I got to thinking about the magic of indie bookstores, and how we try to replicate that in-store magic for you, our long-distance customer and podcast listener. One of the most magical things, to me, about shopping in an indie bookstore is the serendipitous nature of it: how you might stumble upon a book you’ve never seen before and be inspired to read it or buy it because of an in-store recommendation, or simply because the book begs to be read from the shelf. Now, don’t get me wrong: I get that serendipitous feeling from new titles. But it seems to especially come from the unsung book, the book that’s been out for a while, or the book only that particular store seems to know about.
[00:02:40] I think you know what I'm talking about. It feels a little bit like a treasure hunt. So new releases, especially in indie bookstores, are often the featured titles. That's true of our store, too. That's what our bestsellers consist of, is new books, newly released titles, books released within the last year. But when I travel, I like to go to the staff shelves, or I like to browse and look for a book I've never seen before, which is often hard because as a bookseller I am very in-tune, mostly in tune with new books, books that have just been released, books that have just come out. So it feels like a treasure hunt to find a book that maybe I wouldn't have found anywhere else. This year, I thought I would dig through the imaginary Bookshelf vault and highlight backlist titles that I think are special. Books we keep on our own store shelves, even though they were published years ago. Books we secretly hope a customer stumbles on, asks us about, and eventually takes home for themselves.
[00:03:40] Today, I'm talking about Brit Bennett's debut novel from 2016, The Mothers. The Mothers weaves together the stories of three black teenagers living in California, following them, eventually, into their adulthood. Nadia, who's smart and ambitious and since her mother's death, quite reckless and self-destructive, and her quiet, chaste friend Aubrey, both attend Upper Room Chapel, a church where they also cross paths with Luke, the 21-year-old pastor's son who's a little bit wayward himself. Typical -- well, I was about to say typical of pastor's kids. If you're a pastor's kid and you're listening to this, I mean no offense. But I think there's even a quote in the book that talks about the reputation of pastor's children. I'm sorry that was so guttural of me. That wasn't even in my notes. That was just my off the cuff observation of pastor's children. I'm so sorry. But, anyway, Luke is a little bit wayward, and so he and Nadia strike up a friendship. The title of Bennett's book does at first seem a little odd. Both Nadia and Aubrey are motherless, but instead the reader quickly learns. Bennett's "mothers" are a Greek chorus of church ladies from the Upper Room. They are a collective "we" opening every chapter with their opinions and gossip. And they are why I fell in love with this book from the moment I began reading it. Grieving over her mother's death, Nadia winds up sleeping with Luke her senior year of high school, and she becomes pregnant. This is no spoilers. This happens in the very opening pages and she eventually has an abortion before going to Michigan for college, where grief and guilt and thoughts of her hometown follow her through the years, even as she tries to kind of leave her past behind her.
[00:05:30] She ultimately comes back home to California in adulthood, and her high school relationships all come back to haunt her. So throughout the book and chapter by chapter, we get to know Nadia, Aubrey and Luke, what makes them tick and who they become. I love a book where you get to be introduced to a character in their youth, and then we slowly, even through snippets or scenes, get to see them become adult people, and how their youth and the decisions that they made in their youth affect them as adult people. The mothers in the book, the Greek chorus of church ladies, I feel like they could easily steal the story. They are smart and funny. And if you ever have been a member of a religious community, or maybe even just a small town with a Rachel Lynde type busybody, these women are familiar to you. I mean, it's such a creative way to me to have a narration in a book be provided by this kind of Greek chorus. But it's these ladies who pay attention to everything. They see everything. They're the eyes and ears of that church. And so they're guiding us, the reader, through the story. And I do feel like they could steal the whole book, but Bennett employs them just enough. And I remember on my initial reading of The Mothers being struck by the originality of this kind of storytelling and getting lost in this insular black community and the church that everybody calls home. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody's business is each other's business, especially in the view of The Mothers.
[00:07:04] The novel also plays creatively with time. So the stories of Nadia, Aubrey and Luke don't play out in an entirely linear way. They occasionally dip into The Mother's memories, and so chapters often begin with little vignettes of how the teenagers met their different family histories, their losses, their successes. So although mostly the story is told from teenage head into adulthood, there are occasional flashbacks to the death of Nadia's mother, for example, or to Aubrey's raising and why she became this kind of chaste, puritanical young woman. So on the last episode of Into the Backlist, I talked about The Ensemble, which falls soundly in my mind in the character driven genre of literature. The Mothers, to me, is a beautiful blend of plot and character. The book begins with this surprising secret of pregnancy and the repercussions of ending it. And then other plot points spool open from there, almost like a Celeste Ing novel. Or think of a book that, maybe even a Leon Moriarty book where these family secrets are unfolding chapter by chapter. And so although the book is definitely character driven in the sense that it's all about those three teenagers, specifically about Nadia, but really, you get so much insight into Luke's life and into Aubrey's life and into their decisions. So it's character driven, but enough happens.
[00:08:33] I mean, even upon rereading snippets in preparation for today's recording, I was struck by how much was happening in each chapter, how much was unfolding. So I think if you're a plot driven reader, this book will be even more appealing to you than something like The Ensemble. The prose and the writing is also so beautiful. It gives The Mothers these paragraphs of quotable reflections, and then this beautiful, quiet storytelling continues. Like I said, the mothers could steal the story, but they don't because Brit Bennetts writing continues to be captivating beyond the mother's narration. So for the first 100 pages in the book, we get to know the teenagers in all their angst and youth, and then we see them baby stepping into adulthood. Nadia, like I said, goes to college in Michigan. Aubrey stays in town, still attending church, and then Luke attempts to resuscitate his blown football career. He'd experienced an injury. It's kind of why he was wayward and lost when Nadia met him. So years go by and then while Nadia is away at school and she and Aubrey still keep in touch, (though she and Luke do not) Aubrey and Luke fall in love and get married, and Nadia comes home for the wedding and more secrets begin to happen and unspool.
[00:09:54] When I sat down to type up notes for today's episode, I pulled out my copy of The Mothers. I'd forgotten I owned a hardcover edition. I'm pretty sure I read this in ARC format, but I recall raving about it so much that I was graciously gifted a copy by the publisher, and it's signed by Brit Bennett. But I'd forgotten about that because I have a distinct memory of reading like my floppy paperback ARC. But, anyway, I own the hardcover, and as I was typing up today's notes, I really did get lost in these teenagers' lives. I flipped through chapter after chapter until I'd almost reread the whole book, because I became so immersed in Nadia, Aubrey, and Luke and their stories. I wanted desperately to remember and to know what happened to them, because I read this book years ago. If it released in 2016, I probably read it early in that year or late 2015. So that's a long time ago now. And I love their stories because I loved them. I loved the complicated world and the messy people Bennett had created. The novel's title too comes up again and again and again as we see and learn all the different ways of mothering. Though, interestingly, Nadia and her father are often at the story center. I wonder, perhaps, if this is an act of authorial irony. Like the fact that this book is called The Mother's, and we see these church mothers. We see Aubrey in her tendency toward mothering. She's far more stereotypically nurturing than Nadia is. And then later we see Nadia providing care for her aging father. That is mothering.
[00:11:31] I mean, in its way, this book is a father-daughter story. Nadia and her father, have to grapple with the loss of Nadia's mother and the death of Nadia's mother. I should warn you, despite all of these wonderful things about this book that I really do love so much, I should warn you though, this book clocks in at under 300 pages. So The Mother's feels like just a piece of a novel. And I mean that in a good way. But I know for some readers it might not be satisfying. There is plenty of plot. You'll love the characters, but there are ways in which The Mothers reads like a short story would, where the pages aren't telling you entirely what happens to the secrets the characters keep. I think that's partly because the church ladies, the mothers, are only privy to certain details; and so we are, in a way, limited to their speculation and their knowledge. I actually think that's what makes the novel brilliant. But as I was rereading it for today, I just noticed Brit Bennett just gives you just enough. There aren't pretty tied up bows here, and you just don't know everything. You know a lot. You know what the mothers know. You know what Brit Bennett is telling you, but you don't know everything. And so because of how short it is, it really is a short novel, in a way it feels like a slice of a life. Even though it spans years, spans decades, you still feel like you don't know Nadia fully. You don't know Aubrey fully. You just know a little bit about them and the circumstances that they find themselves in.
[00:13:04] So this is the reason I love this novel so much. I like a book that leaves me wanting more. Not in a “please-give-me-a-sequel” kind of way (because honestly, I never really want a sequel), but in a “life-doesn’t-have-pretty-bows-and-so-books-don’t-either” kind of way. The Mothers showed readers immediately what a brilliant writer Brit Bennett is. I could not believe this was a debut novel when I read it, and she's just 34 now, which means she was like in her mid 20s when she published this, which I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it. And so her sophomore novel, which you might be familiar with, The Vanishing Half, when it came out, it released a few years later. I was super nervous. I even put off reading my own copy. I got an advanced reader copy I think because I loved The Mother so much, and I put off reading it because, I thought, I don't know how she's going to follow this up. But it turns out The vanishing half, as you know, if you've read it, was just as brilliant, which is a testament to the writer Bennett already was, is, and is becoming. I still love The Mothers. I loved The Vanishing Half. It was a Shelf Subscription selection of mine, but I still love The Mothers. Still hold it close to my heart, as a book I discovered at just the right time. Reading a debut novel, as a bookseller, before anybody else feels like finding a needle in a haystack, like discovering the buried treasure before anybody else. The Mothers, in my mind, feels like that. It feels like a buried treasure I stumbled upon and then I got to share it with everybody else.
[00:14:29] So if you have been a long time listener of From The Front Porch, I raved about this book back in 2016. I just loved it from the moment I encountered it, and so I've been a champion of it for a long time. You've probably heard me mention it in passing, so it almost felt like cheating. Maybe this isn't quite back in the vault far enough, but I wanted to revisit it, and I'm so glad I did because I essentially wound up rereading it. And I still love it so very much. It holds up, which is a delightful thing to discover. Okay, so like we do with every episode, here's some basic stats. This book was a fall release. It released in October of 2016, clocks in at 275 pages, and it was published by Riverhead. I don't know that it was the beginning of my love for Riverhead titles, but this definitely was when I was starting to pay attention to publishers and imprints. That's not something I really ever paid attention to as a lay reader. That is only something that I started to pay attention to as a buyer and a bookstore owner. And so at that time, Riverhead was publishing all of these books with these really striking patterned covers. I don't know if you remember that, but it feels like it was a trend at that time. And so this book was striking on the shelf and in the catalog, and it made me start to pay attention to Riverhead, I think, as an imprint.
[00:15:45] As far as critics and what critics have to say, if you've listened to these episodes, you know that Kirkus-- which I normally feel like Kirkus and I right now are typically on the same page. But when I looked back at previous reviews of other titles I really loved, I found that we were not on the same page. So this is the first time I felt like we agreed, though I was surprised this did not receive a starred review from them, which I still am a little surprised by. Kirkus said this was a wise and sad coming of age story showing how people are shaped by their losses. And then this is interesting. They recommended it for both adult and teen readers. I have never thought about The Mothers as a YA title, but the Kirkus Review did make me reconsider it. And when I went back and reread, I do think especially now where so many young adult titles feel "new adult"-- new adult is not a term I've seen used in publisher catalogs, but it's definitely a term you see in the industry on other podcasts, in bookstores. I've even seen bookstores with a new adult section, which I think would be so hard because many publishers do not categorize their books that way. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
[00:16:58] My point is I could see YA readers really liking this, especially now so many young adult novels are geared towards people in their 20s. And so if you're a YA reader, particularly 16, 17 and up, I think The Mother's actually would be a great read for that age range. It did receive a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Publishers Weekly said, "Deftly juggling multiple issues, Bennett addresses the subjects abortion, infidelity, religious faith, hypocrisy and race head on. There's much blame to go around, and Bennett distributed equally, but she also shows an extraordinary compassion for her flawed characters. A Greek chorus of narrating gossipy mothers from the local Upper Room chapel provides further context and an extra layer to an already exquisitely developed story. I could not agree more. When I first read this back in 2016, I know that one of the things that I was struck by was Bennett's dealing with religious faith and with the Christian faith, particularly as it relates to church and church attendance and church culture. I just felt like at that time I had not read a ton of books like that outside of maybe some Christian fiction I might have read as a teenager or something. Certainly, it was one of the most beautiful books I'd ever read that dealt with the Christian faith as just part of culture and part of life. It wasn't really not a big deal was made out of it. It was just part of these characters' lives.
[00:18:27] The book also received a rave review from Mira Jacobs, the author. She wrote a rave review in The New York Times. Her review is excellent if you want to Google for it. But she says, "The Mother's is a lush book; a book of so many secrets, betrayals, and reckonings that to spill them in the lines of a review instead of letting them play out as the author intended, would be silly. Instead, I will tell you this: despite Bennett's thrumming plot, despite the snap of her pacing, it's the always deepening complexity of her characters that provides the book's urgency. Bennett's ability to unwind them gently, offering insights both shocking and revelatory, has a striking effect. I found myself reading not to find out what happens to the characters, but to find out who they are. Long after closing the book, I am still like the most dogged of children trying to follow them." Y'all, reviewing is an art in and of itself. That review is so good. It's so well written and I think it really does encapsulate so well exactly how I feel about this book. It got a 3.89 on Goodreads, whatever. Whatever Goodreads, I don't know. Sometimes I hop on Goodreads and I'm like, what's happening over here? I don't know.
[00:19:36] It reminds me of when my therapist told me to stop reading internet comments. I guess I could see that, but like I said, I reread this book in preparation for this episode, and 3.89 feels very low to me. Because I think I could understand that for The Ensemble a little bit. Even though I loved The Ensemble, I could understand someone else not liking it. The Mothers to me has something for everybody. I think if you like dysfunctional family lit, if you like young adult lit, if you like faith-based literature, if you like character-driven, if you like plot-driven, I really do think there's something for everybody. So I don't know, Goodreads, you do you. Okay. And then, like I said, if you're a long time listener From the Front Porch, I've talked about this one quite a bit. For context, today, this is episode 476-- which is appalling to me on every level. But this is episode 476 of From the Front Porch. I mentioned The Mothers in episode 99. That was the best books of 2016. I mentioned it in episode 118, which was an episode we did on books about mothers. And then as recently as episode 406, which is an episode I did last year about my favorite books. I mentioned The Mothers at length and in depth there.
[00:20:55] If you prefer listening to some things about The Mothers, there's a great small piece on NPR that Maureen Corrigan did for Fresh Air. It's like a six minute listen that's really worth your time. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. My one-sentence-hand-sell for this book is The Mothers is a coming of age story about secrets, betrayals, motherhood, and faith, and the reader is guided by a chorus of church ladies they won't ever forget. Today, I would put this on the shelf with Revival Season by Monica West, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi because of the way that book grapples with faith and science. Memorial Drive, the memoir by Natasha Trethewey. A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson, that is another book that feels on the cusp of YA and adult lit. The color of water. One of my favorite memoirs of all time by James McBride. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. And this is the weird one, this is the outlier, but Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is her nonfiction book about marriage. But she has a great section, a great chapter on being an aunty and what motherhood looks like when you're not perhaps a biological mother or somebody who has given birth. And so, anyway, there are sections of The Mothers that very much remind me of that section of that book.
[00:22:17] Favorite quote. Well, this is very difficult because truly, this book is so, so well written. But in case you're wondering, I think what happened is my ARC I marked up and then I got the hardback copy. So it was very funny because I see that I transcribed my notes into the hardback version. So I found a lot of highlighted sections or underlined sections that I really loved. I started the episode with one of the quotes, but this is another quote that stuck out to me. This is being spoken by the church mothers. "We don't think of ourselves as 'prayer warriors.' A man must have come up with that term-- men think anything difficult is war, but prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. More than just a notion taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don't even know... If you don't become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words." I think you should read this book if you like character-driven books that also feature plot and intrigue and family secrets. If you like stories about the beauties and hardships of ordinary life, if you like books with themes of church and faith, or if you have thoughts about mothers, mothering and motherhood. I would love to know if you have ever read The Mothers by Brit Bennett, or if you could be encountering or picking it up for the first time after this episode. I hope you'll report back. This is truly one of my favorite books of the last 10 years, I guess, and I hope you love it as much as I do.
[00:23:49] This week I'm listening to Funny Story by Emily Henry.
[00:23:52] Annie Jones: From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in Thomasville, Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website: bookshelfthomasville.com A full transcript of today’s episode can be found at:
Special thanks to Studio D Podcast Production for production of From the Front Porch and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.
Our Executive Producers of today’s episode are…
Cammy Tidwell, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Stephanie Dean, Ashley Ferrell, Jennifer Bannerton
Executive Producers (Read Their Own Names): Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins, Susan Hulings
Annie Jones: If you’d like to support From the Front Porch, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Your input helps us make the show even better and reach new listeners. All you have to do is open up the Podcast App on your phone, look for From the Front Porch, scroll down until you see ‘Write a Review’ and tell us what you think. Or, if you’re so inclined, support us over on Patreon, where we have 3 levels of support - Front Porch Friends, Book Club Companions, and Bookshelf Benefactors. Each level has an amazing number of benefits like bonus content, access to live events, discounts, and giveaways. Just go to: patreon.com/fromthefrontporch We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.