The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Reviews / Votes

Mathis traces the fates of Hattie's 12 children and grandchildren over the course of the 20th century, simultaneously capturing the voices and daily minutiae of every one of her characters ... A complex and engrossing work that has huge commercial hit written all over ... Remarkable. * Sunday Times * This fresh, powerful first novel turns the lives of Hattie's children into an epic of America in the 20th century. Tough, truthful, wonderfully controlled writing. * The Times * 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. * New York Times * 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. 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. A treasure of a novel. I can't remember when I read anything that moved me quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison. -- Oprah Winfrey This is a bold debut that sets out to address the huge themes of motherhood and US history through the tale of one dysfunctional family, and succeeds. * Financial Times * The opening chapter is a cracker, exquisitely written, full of vividly evoked tension and searing emotion. It is painful - relentlessly so - with a devastating coup de grace. * Scotland on Sunday * An unexpectedly uplifting reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. * Good Housekeeping * As unremittingly bleak as her characters' lives are, Mathis has not produced a grim novel: it is as much about our need for joy as it is about our struggles against bitterness. Written with elegance and remarkable poise ... memorable and with the hint of something formidable glinting under the surface. * Guardian *