Set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama-about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.
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.
