Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it's even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them.īut when seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. Generations of Montrose women-Augusta, Victoria, Willow-have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years.
SO PROUD that my former student's debut novel was chosen as the Today Show book pick for March 2023.A Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club PickĪ warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women living under one roof and the family curse that stems back to a Voodoo shop in 1950s New Orleans. The curse isn't just that their beloved men die, but that their fear of love distorts all their relationships. I especially enjoyed the richness of the sensual world inhabited by these women, the ingredients of the spells, the openness to the senses, and the disconnect between the four points of view, each woman with her own secret life, her guilt, her struggles, even in such a small isolated family, the layers of disconnect. Two other Montrose women round out the cast- Victoria and Willow's wayward mother, Madelyn, now attempting reconciliation, and Victoria's daughter Nickie, seventeen and in love and trying to find herself in the shadow of this curse which has always been kept a secret from her, yet whose restrictions have isolated her and her family.
Now an elderly woman, mute after a stroke, Augustina lives in Long Beach, California with her granddaughters Victoria, a therapist, and Willow, her assistant, both of whom practice hoodoo in their own ways, and whose lives have been distorted by the curse that Bela Nova laid upon Augustina and all her progeny, that the men they love will die. A warm, sensual novel centering upon the all-female Montrose family, practitioners of hoodoo, and laboring under a curse begun with grandmother Augustina incurred when she worked as an assistant to a hoodoo practitioner, Bela Nova, in an occult shop in New Orleans.
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