In Mother Tongue, Naima Brown delivers a rare novel — one that is as emotionally devastating as it is intellectually stimulating. Set in a small American town and later unfolding across the streets of Paris, Mother Tongue explores motherhood, friendship, trauma, and self-reinvention with a raw, lyrical touch that stays with the reader long after the final page.
At its heart, Mother Tongue follows Brynn, a woman suffocating under the quiet weight of suburban life. Her marriage to Eric — a man bound by tradition, patriotism, and toxic ideals of masculinity — feels more like a performance than a partnership. Her devotion to her daughter Jenny is sincere, but riddled with self-doubt. Early on, Brown carefully captures Brynn’s internal life: she is neither heroic nor villainous, but achingly real, embodying the loneliness that can exist even within a family.
The plot kicks off with a life-altering car accident. In a strange twist, Brynn wakes speaking fluent French — a language she once studied only casually. This surreal detail is no gimmick: Brown uses it as a powerful metaphor for transformation. French becomes the symbol of a new self Brynn both fears and craves, a self no longer tethered to the expectations that have slowly eroded her sense of personhood.
The novel doesn’t unfold from Brynn’s perspective alone. Brown constructs a rich, multifaceted narrative by writing chapters through the perspective of Lisa, Brynn’s best friend, and Eric, her husband. Lisa’s simmering envy and complicated love for Brynn, and Eric’s bruised ego and inability to adapt, form a web of competing truths. By shifting between perspectives, Brown prevents any single character from claiming full moral authority. Each is trapped by their own yearning — for validation, for love, for escape — and each damages others, sometimes irreparably, in their search.
One of Mother Tongue’s most potent thematic threads is its exploration of language not simply as communication, but as identity itself. When Brynn begins speaking French — and later experiences other linguistic shifts — it’s as if she is shedding old selves, embracing the radical possibility of becoming someone new. Yet Brown is careful to show that reinvention is never clean or painless. Language here is liberation, but also alienation; it is a way to claim freedom, but a reminder that escaping who we were is always partial at best.
Brown’s treatment of motherhood is equally unflinching. She dismantles the idealised notion of maternal instinct, showing how women are expected to lose themselves in the role, and how punishing the world can be when they resist. Through Brynn’s decisions — some brave, some deeply flawed — Brown asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: Can a mother prioritise her own survival without being condemned? Why is maternal absence so much more stigmatised than paternal neglect?
Over the years, we see the legacy of Brynn’s choices ripple through Jenny, her first daughter who she abandoned before leaving to Paris and starting a new life. Jenny’s struggles with identity, belonging, and resentment echo her mother’s, creating a poignant intergenerational portrait of longing and repair. Yet Mother Tongue never slips into melodrama. Instead, Brown crafts moments of aching realism, where reconciliation, when it comes, is tentative and incomplete — healing from betrayal, whether familial or personal, is a process without clear resolution.
Stylistically, Brown writes with a keen eye for the textures of emotional life. Small moments — a lingering glance, a half-spoken sentence, a slip into another language — carry enormous weight. The novel’s lyrical voice, combined with its tight psychological realism, places it in conversation with writers like Elizabeth Strout and Celeste Ng, yet Brown’s use of language as both theme and device is distinctly her own.
If Mother Tongue has a thesis, it is this: identity is not a single coherent story but a collection of shifting selves. It is shaped by language, love, loss, and the impossible tension between who we are and who we want to be. Family, in this novel, is not destiny. It is a choice: painful, fragile, necessary.
Final Thoughts
Naima Brown’s Mother Tongue is an ambitious and beautifully realized debut into literary fiction, a novel that asks its readers to sit with discomfort, to recognize the complexity of forgiveness, and to embrace the idea that love and betrayal often live side by side. It is both a sharp critique of societal expectations and a tender exploration of human vulnerability.
For readers willing to follow Brown’s characters into their messy emotional landscapes, Mother Tongue promises to be one of the most affecting, thought-provoking releases of the year.
Mother Tongue was published on 25 March 2025 by Pan Macmillan.
