MOTHER COUNTRY

This story of a kidnapping in Morocco explores global inequity from the points of view of two mothers.

The first half of the novel depicts the experiences of two very different women: Shannon, a Black American trying to keep her marriage together, and Souria, a Mauritanian struggling to survive. Souria is first shown as a teenager who’s been captured in the Sahara and taken as a slave by a desert tribe. Resourceful and brave, she eventually escapes to the city of Marrakech, where she tries to build a better life for herself and her 2-year-old daughter, Yu. That is, until Shannon, while vacationing with her engineer boyfriend, comes upon Yu in an alley, assumes the disheveled girl has been abandoned, and brings her back to the U.S. to adopt her. Shannon's own trauma at first blinds her to the harm she is causing. She’s a disabled, highly indebted woman who was all but abandoned by her emotionally distant middle-class parents. The pace accelerates in the second half of the book while also introducing a third perspective, that of the adopted daughter, now renamed Mardi. Although the readers see Mardi/Yu struggling to adapt to a new way of life in Louisville, Kentucky, she is never as fully developed a character as the other women. It’s also hard to believe that Shannon as depicted would actually kidnap a child. The novel’s great strengths are the gorgeous prose and deep empathy that Townsend extends to both Souria and Shannon. Her multifaceted portrait of Morocco and insights into American privilege, transnational colorism, and transgenerational trauma elevate what could have been merely a tragic crime story.

This thought-provoking novel highlights the precarious state of Black women and girls.