CURSES AND OTHER BURIED THINGS
YA I SOUTHERN GOTHIC | MYSTERY
Blood holds all kinds of curses.
When her eighteenth birthday triggers a generational curse, a girl in a Southern swamp town seeks to reckon the histories of her ancestors.
“Blood holds all kinds of curses.”
Seven generations of women in Susana Prather’s family have been lost to the Georgia swamp behind her house. The morning after her eighteenth birthday, she awakens soaked with water, with no memory of sleepwalking. No matter how she tries to stop it, she’s pulled from her safe bed night after night, haunted by her own family history and legacy. Now, the truth feels unavoidable: it’s only a matter of time before she loses her mind and the swamp becomes her grave.
Unless she can figure out how to break the curse.
When she isn’t sleepwalking, she’s dreaming of her great-great-great-great-grandmother, Suzanna Yawn, who set the curse in motion in 1855. Her ancestor’s life bears such similarity to her own that it might hold the key she seeks. Or it might only foretell tragedy.
As Susana seeks solutions in the past and the present, family members hold secrets tighter to their chests, friends grow distant, and old flames threaten to sputter and die. But Susana has something no one else has been able to seize: the unflagging belief that all curses can be broken and that love can help a new future begin.
Buy Now
PRAISE
A teenager strives to break a generations-old curse in which the firstborn daughter always meets a tragic end in this propulsive story by George (The Summer We Forgot) . . . Sumptuous, dark details increase the creeping atmosphere of this judiciously rendered psychological exploration of blame, healing, and trauma.
Pulses with Southern Gothic mystery and atmosphere like the hum of summer-night cicadas, and glows with hope and love like the fireflies that illuminate the sultry dark. The only thing that will slow your page-turning is pausing every other line to read a perfect sentence a few more times.
You will just have to take my word when I tell you this book IS a literary masterpiece.
Yet beyond the gorgeous southern vibes, intriguing characters, & twisty mystery were deep truths—hard truths—and so much heart & hope. It’s a story of learning to live outside the shadows of our pasts.
Full of mystery and an eerie resonance, Curses and Other Buried Things explores the bonds, the beauty and the bitterness of family inheritances against a southern gothic setting that seeps into the reader like swamp water.
An immersive, beautifully crafted tale about overcoming the life-defining words we’ve always heard about ourselves and finding the courage to live in freedom. Unforgettable.
Past and present are richly intertwined in this gorgeously written, atmospheric novel.
MEET THE AUTHOR
