Book Review: Mother Tongue by Naima Brown
What if being true to yourself means hurting everyone around you?
Brynn is a claustrophobic suburban mother on the brink. Eric, her husband, is transforming in dark and dangerous ways. Their daughter, Jenny, can’t fathom the storm barrelling towards her.
When Brynn awakes from a coma speaking fluent French, she seizes the opportunity to start a new life in Paris, a seismic personal transformation that leaves a slew of shattered lives in its wake.
Darkly funny and profoundly insightful, Mother Tongue challenges our expectations of motherhood and our beliefs about women’s lives. It is at once an exhilarating tale of escape and a warning about the cost of renewal.
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia
Released March 2025
My Thoughts:Mother Tongue by Naima Brown was entirely different from my expectations, and this turned out to be entirely okay because it far exceeded them in every way! I feel like this one would be 110% perfect for book clubs. There is just so much in it to unpack.
There’s the characters for a start. Brynn, our main character, is the mother whose actions are the centre of this story. Then there’s Lisa, best friend and mother figure to Brynn’s daughter, Jenny. Jenny herself, who becomes one of the character perspectives later on in her teenage years. And Eric, Jenny’s father, Brynn’s husband/ex-husband, and Lisa’s…well, that’s a whole other can of worms with how he treats Lisa and who he is to her. All of these characters bring their own particular spark to this story, but I’ll put my hand up for Lisa and Jenny being favourites.
‘Jenny had come to believe that the only way forward was to learn to inhabit the space between good and bad, right and wrong, and to make peace with contradiction. Love wasn’t what she’d thought it was. It wasn’t a solid, unchanging thing you could rely on.’
This story has certainly got its humour, a bit on the dark side and definitely laugh out loud at times, but it’s far deeper than a comedy about a woman who falls down, wakes from a coma thinking she’s French and then runs away to Paris to find herself. It’s a rather deep examination of motherhood: what it means to be a mother, from nurturing through pregnancy to giving birth, and then caring and raising to adulthood and beyond. It raises questions about what makes a mother – nature or nurture, does abandonment ever have a justification, can you undo what has already had a cataclysmic effect, and are some women just inherently cut out for motherhood while some are not. So. Many. Questions. There’s so much about female agency woven into this story as well, which is so incredibly relevant as we live in a time when many countries seem to be stripping that back and moving into the past instead of continuing to progress forward.
‘Brynn had smuggled herself out of America, she’d written herself a new story, created a new context and mythology in which to both understand and explain herself. It had never occurred to her that this was a kind of theft, an abuse of power, a wielding of privilege, something that might not have been afforded to her if she weren’t white, attractive, and – at the time – young: the trifecta of power in the Western World.’
I loved this one and highly recommend it to all readers, particularly those who like their fiction smart, controversial, and brimming with intelligent humour.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
