Reviews
Advance Praise for The Twelve Tribes of Hattie "The opening pages of Ayana's debut took my breath away.I can't remember whenI read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison." -Oprah Winfrey "Piercing…Ms. Mathis writes with uncommon narrative authority in The Twelve Tribes of Hattie , conjuring the lives of the Shepherd family with extraordinary psychological precision…Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters' minds and hearts…Astonishingly powerful." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mathis never loses touch with the geography and the changing national culture through which her characters move. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is infused with African Americans' conflicted attitudes about the North and the South during the Great Migration…In the long family arc that Mathis describes, the painful life of one remarkably resilient woman is placed against the hopes and struggles of millions of African Americans who held this nation to its promise…One of the best [novels] of 2012." -Ron Charles, The Washington Post "The influence of Toni Morrison will be evident in this remarkable page-turner of a novel that spans decades and covers dreams lost, found, and denied." -Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune , "Editor's Choice" "A stirring, soulful novel that spans 60 years and is told in many rich and varied voices. It's the story of one formidable woman, and of her children-the 'tribes'-at different stages of their sprawling lives. It's the story of the Great Migration, and of its ripping, aching effects across the 20th century… The Twelve Tribes of Hattie wallops you from the first chapter, but the book's emotional power grows with the story as the decades pass and the scope of this family's life is revealed." - Shelf Awareness " The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer's judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity." -Marilynne Robinson " The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love. Ayana Mathis has written a treasure of a novel." -Paul Harding "Writing with stunning authority, clarity, and courage, debut novelist Mathis pivots forward in time, spotlighting intensely dramatic episodes in the lives of Hattie''s nine subsequent children (and one grandchild to make the 'twelve tribes'), galvanizing crises that expose the crushed dreams and anguished legacy of the Great Migration….Mathis writes with blazing insight into the complexities of sexuality, marriage, family relationships, backbone, fraudulence, and racism in a molten novel of lives racked with suffering yet suffused with beauty." -Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred) "Remarkable…Mathis weaves this story with confidence, proving herself a gifted and powerful writer." - Publishers Weekly (starred) "Cutting, emotional…pure heartbreak…though Mathis has inherited some of Toni Morrison's poetic intonation, her own prose is appealingly earthbound and plainspoken, and the book's structure is ingenious…an excellent debut." - Kirkus Reviews (starred)
