Do daughters always have to repeat their mothers' traumas?

“Someone up there has it in for me,” Meryl Streep’s character complains in the film “Mamma Mia.” “I bet it’s my mother.”

Any of the mothers or daughters in Sarai Johnson’s moving debut novel, which follows a family of black women across four generations as they struggle to transcend their violent past, could have expressed that sentiment. “Grown Women” joins a series of epic family dramas that erupt with long-buried secrets, devastating loss and ghosts.

But Johnson’s interests go beyond familial antagonisms. “Grown Women” examines what happens when a child can’t rely on “the most basic, essential love the world has to offer,” and how black women overcome the combined obstacles of generational trauma and a culture that limits nearly every facet of their lives.

The story begins in Nashville, 1974, with Charlotte, who has recently left Atlanta to escape her abusive mother. She gives birth to a baby she has so little interest in bringing into the world that she hasn't bothered to think of a name and doesn't comfort the child when she cries. Born into a world of Mercedes-Benzes and Gucci suitcases, and into a family that expected her, a talented pianist, to attend Spelman College, Charlotte ends up a single mother, answering the phones at a real estate agency.

Four years later, Charlotte's daughter Corinna paints sweetly at the kitchen table while her mother daydreams of filicide. Charlotte decides she needs a husband to ease the burden of child-rearing. The white man she marries is unfaithful and drinks too much, but he pays the bills and lovingly cares for Corinna, while Charlotte never warms to the task.

It can be hard to root for Charlotte. Many of her interactions with her young, innocent daughter — “Corinna tried to grab her mother, but Charlotte backed away” — are heartbreaking. But the book builds a compelling mystery around what made Charlotte, whose “brand of sadness didn’t come from discrimination or hardship like that of most black people in her part of the world,” so hostile. Johnson masterfully places breadcrumbs throughout the novel that resonate once Charlotte’s backstory emerges in a genuinely unexpected and meaningful way.

Before we get to that point, Johnson places us in the 1990s, when Charlotte and Corinna no longer have much to say to each other. At 18, Corinna becomes pregnant by a classmate destined for the NFL. He agrees to provide financial support for her daughter, Camille, but nothing more. Charlotte vows to help raise the child, who inherits her grandmother's beauty and intelligence and also awakens her maternal instinct, inflaming tension between Charlotte and Corinna.

When she is 7, a tragedy disrupts Camille's life and leads her down a destructive path. It also widens the gap between her and Corinna, who repeats her own mother's patterns and begins to physically beat Camille.

Johnson holds nothing back in her frank depiction of the cycles of violence that the family perpetuates. Mothers also pass on to their daughters an emotional reserve that, in many ways, destroys their potential. But the women's emotional wounds and humanity do elicit compassion.

This cycle has one point of origin: Charlotte's mother, Evelyn, a wealthy woman who believes that “weeping is undignified.” Her heartbreaking abuse of Charlotte is far from her most egregious offense. Yet even Evelyn seeks to connect with her descendants. Though Charlotte has ignored her mother's attempts to reunite for years, once she decides that she and Corinna cannot give Kate-Moss-and-Teen Vogue-Loving Camille as the life she deserves, they ask Evelyn to take the child in.

As Charlotte tells Camille at one point, “Sometimes the best thing you can do for the people you love is to leave them.”

All of Camille’s “mothers” see her as a bright light and a purpose they can root for. The central questions of the book are whether Camille can break the cycle of her family and whether her mothers can overcome their resentments to find peace with themselves and with others.

The novel deftly interrogates how expectations around motherhood can trap women, especially those who don't want to be mothers in the first place. It also investigates the external realities that can blight the inner lives of black women. Evelyn, an academic, researches Harlem Renaissance artist Gwendolyn Bennett, who, Johnson writes, “died in obscurity after decades of serving the movement.” During her studies, Evelyn mysteriously receives a note from what she believes to be a ghost: “'Did you [the artist] “Did you know any different?” he asks. “Would the world have allowed anything different?”

At times, Johnson's decision to alternate between the four women's points of view and time periods (from the '70s to the '90s and then back to the '80s, etc.) can bog down the narrative. Revisited scenes from different characters' perspectives don't always offer new information.

Still, we can't help but rejoice when these women manage to touch the hearts of others. Their stories suggest that sometimes the person who has it in for us may also be the person who loves us the most.

Laura Warrell is the author of the novel “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm.”