Makes a strong case for the fact that the past can never truly be shaken off ... Poignant, heartbreaking ... The shifts in perspective can try the reader’s patience, but they mirror the reality that every historical event inspires multiple, conflicting points of view.
There is a sentimental strain in black literature that casts back to an ancestral African heritage to locate a sense of self. But a yearning for home in the Deep South is a more fraught concept, and Ms. Mathis nicely gets at 'the weight of [an] inheritance' that includes bloodshed and oppression ... The Unsettled follows Ms. Mathis’s debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012), whose loosely assembled family vignettes also explored the ambivalent aftermath of the Great Migration north. But this is a far better book, more focused and cohesive, and also more alive. This may be because here the South is not merely a ghostly memory but, in the form of Dutchess’s riotous monologues, an expressive voice, cajoling and imploring its exiles and calling them back home.
Important ... Mathis’s work develops a profound sense of Black place within a wider ecology of violence from historical plantations to shelters for the dehoused and prisons in the late-20th-century US city ... With this novel, Mathis seeks to unsettle, and she succeeds.
Those of us who have more recently seen hell wreaked by the authorities in our cities — Minneapolis, Baltimore — will appreciate her fictional journey onto that scorched earth. It is an ardent, ambitious and carefully stitched tapestry of a novel, one that deserves and rewards our attention.
Sharp characters, vivid settings, and beautiful sentences ... The worlds of these two places, and these two women, mesh in surprising and gorgeous ways ... Fans will not be disappointed.
In heartfelt, pellucid language that sparkles even as it cuts to the bone, readers enter Ava’s troubled mind, feel the roach-infested stickiness of the shelter, and follow Ava as she rejoins Cass, only to be caught in the awful police violence of 1985 Philadelphia ... Another triumph for Mathis.
Outstanding ... Another tale of a dynamic family and the aftereffects of intergenerational racist violence, but these new characters have voices and stories all their own.
Simmering ... Mathis ratchets up the tension all the way to a stunning reveal, which reunites the family members for a reckoning with the truth. Readers won’t want to miss Mathis’s accomplished return.
