![]() While Hattie’s marriage sours, the children keep on coming. They just made his life a little more livable from one day to the next.” His behaviour traps his wife and children in a cycle of poverty: “Hattie could almost hear them growing, their wrists lengthening and poking out beyond the cuffs of their sleeves, their feet outgrowing their shoes, their shoulders widening and pulling the fabric of their coats taut.” He turns out to be a self-defeating man who drinks his pay cheques and sleeps around with women who “didn’t mean anything. Her grief is compounded by disappointment in her husband. She “wanted to give her babies names that weren’t chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and hope, reaching forward names, not looking back ones.” When the babies die, Hattie’s optimism leaves with them. The children, Philadelphia and Jubilee, have been named to reflect Hattie’s hopes for life in the north. She’s holed up in the bathroom of her rented house, fighting to save her twin babies from pneumonia. We first meet Hattie, the title character, at 17-years-old. ![]() But I returned to the novel eagerly each time, partly because the story is compelling, but largely because the writing is flawlessly beautiful. ![]() The narrative was so relentlessly bleak I had to take the odd break to remind myself that joy exists in the world. ![]() I found I couldn’t read The Twelve Tribes of Hattie as a straight shot. ![]()
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