Our Take
Ayana Mathis writes with a patience and precision that rewards close attention, and The Unsettled is no exception. Following her acclaimed debut The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, this second novel confirms she's one of the sharpest chroniclers of Black American family life working today, unafraid to sit inside discomfort rather than resolve it neatly. What distinguishes this book is its structural ambition: braiding Ava and Toussaint's precarious present in Philadelphia with Dutchess's fight to preserve a legacy community in Alabama. Readers who loved the multigenerational scope of Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones or the quiet devastation of Jacqueline Woodson's adult fiction will find familiar textures here, though Mathis's prose has its own rhythm, spare but never cold, attentive to small physical details that carry enormous emotional weight. The novel's themes, land, ownership, motherhood, and the specific vulnerability of being poor and Black in America, never feel didactic. Mathis trusts her characters to carry the argument instead of stating it outright. Fans of Angela Flournoy's The Turner House will recognize this approach: a deep interest in how history lodges itself in a family's bones and a house's walls. This is a book for readers who want their literary fiction unhurried and emotionally exacting, who don't mind sitting with hard truths instead of tidy comfort. If you appreciated the generational weight of Ward or Flournoy, add Mathis to your list.
