Review: Mass Mothering - Sarah Bruni

Genre: literary fiction

Published: Henry Holt and Co, February 2026

My Rating: 2/5 stars

Framed as a story within a story, Sarah Bruni has crafted a tale of motherhood and power disparity, that unfortunately didn’t click with me.

We follow A., an unnamed translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. She is still recovering from a medical trauma that took her reproductive organs, and spends her days nannying for another woman’s boy and her nights out dancing with a man only referred to as N. N is an immigrant, and among his meager possessions, A discovers a manuscript of “Field Notes”, painting a tragic portrait of N’s hometown. A town where a community of mothers collectively mourns their disappearing sons…Interweaving A’s story of grief and discovery with the chorus of the mothers mourning, Bruni creates a story of maternal care and womanhood in all its shapes and roles.

Despite dealing with some incredibly heavy topics, including medical trauma, infertility, political/governmental injustice and collective grief, Bruni deliberately keeps the reader at an arm’s length distance from all of it. This is especially apparent in the storyline of the disappearing-boys-mothers, where a horrific tragedy is presented through the eyes of an outside observer, who has no emotional investment in the events. Yet even in A’s timeline, where we are literally in the mind of the person it concerns most, the story feels distant and impersonal – a recollection of mere events rather than an emotional engagement with them. I realize this is a conscious choice by the author, even going so far as to anonymize the characters by even stripping them of their names and referring to them by their initials only. Unfortunately, this distance took away from the power of the narrative, instead of adding to it, as was the intend.

Had the book been a little longer, I might have grown into the characters a bit more, and there could’ve been a powerful message in that growth. Every nameless face in a crowd has a full person behind it… I personally felt the current short length didn’t allow for that. Nor did it allow for a deep enough exploration of the themes to connect A’s storyline to that of the mothers in a satisfying way. As a result, the two storylines felt disjointed, in addition to impersonal.

Overall, the combination of anonymity, disconnect and a short length made for an unfortunately forgettable end product.

A note on the audiobook: I really enjoyed the narrators  voice, but I would’ve preferred to have a second narrator for the Field-Notes-storyline, to help differentiate the two, with the lack of chapter-headers in audioformat.

Many thanks to Brilliance Audio for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.