The Mothers by Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett's 2016 The Mothers was a wonderful read.  She creates a strong sense of place (southern
Cal, around San Diego and the military bases down there.  I visited that area this summer and it's really unique) and characters - Nadia and Aubrey are the type of girls you want to be best friends with.

In the beginning, Nadia and Luke, the minister's son, are secretly dating, and she gets pregnant.  She has an abortion and this connects them for a long time.  Nadia meets Aubrey, another motherless child in her town and church, and they become like sisters.  Nadia's mother died by suicide shortly after she was born, and Aubrey's mother failed to protect her from her abusive boyfriend, so she left.  These two black girls form a strong bond that surpasses Nadia going to college and law school in other cities.

The "Mothers" of the title are actually the collective elder mothers of the church, who operate as something like a Greek chorus in the book.  Bennett writes them from first person plural, like an omniscient narrator, but with some sass.

We would've told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honest left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask you hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

Spoiler!

The end of the book was exquisite.  The Mothers move from the position as distant narrators to active participants in the story as they casually share their observances about Nadia and Luke and Luke's parents, causing membership in the church to flag and eventually the church fails, the paster and his wife no longer pillars of their community.  And this last paragraph!  I die.

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She's her mother's age now. Double her age. Our age. You're our mother. We're climbing inside of you.