Black Candle Women
A Read with Jenna Pick
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3.9 • 133 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Seen on the Today Show
“If you like Practical Magic… you will love Black Candle Women.” —Jenna Bush Hager
Named a Best Book of the Month by: Shondaland, MS. Magazine, TODAY.com, Reader’s Digest, Katie Couric Media, AARP Sisters, Goodreads, BookRiot
A warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women, a family love curse, and the secrets they keep for and from each other over one very complicated year
Generations of Montrose women—Augusta, Victoria, Willow—have always lived together in their quaint California bungalow. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. But when young Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray.
For the family has withheld a crucial secret from Nickie all these years: any person a Montrose woman falls in love with will die. Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. And as new truths about the curse emerge, they're set on a collision course dating back to 1950s New Orleans’s French Quarter—where a hidden story in a mysterious book may just hold the answers they seek in life and in love…
“Richly imagined and elegantly told, with plenty of satisfying secrets, heartaches, and twists.”
—Sadeqa Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, a Reese's Book Club Pick
“Propulsive and poignant, Black Candle Women concocts an intoxicating potion of warmth, wisdom, and wonder.” —Ava DuVernay
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Diane Marie Brown’s debut novel mixes voodoo, love, and family dysfunction into a potent cocktail full of intrigue and excitement. Teenager Nickie lives quietly with her mother, Victoria; her aunt; and her great-grandmother. That is, until she learns that her entire family line was cursed by a vengeful voodoo woman back in the 1950s and any man they fall in love with will die. So naturally, when Nickie starts getting romantic with a boy named Felix…things get complicated. We loved the way this richly textured story alternates between each woman’s POV, moving back and forth between ’50s New Orleans and modern-day California. And even as Brown kept us on pins and needles with all the mystery and magic, she warmed our hearts with the deep connections between the women of the Montrose family. Settle in for a deeply felt family drama with a shadowy magical twist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Love and death plague four generations of magical Montrose women in Brown's middling debut. Augusta; her granddaughters, Victoria and Willow; and her great-granddaughter, Nickie, all share the Montrose curse: any person they fall in love with dies. The women have managed to live self-sufficiently in California thanks to Willow's hoodoo and Victoria's successful therapy practice. Then, on Nickie's 17th birthday, she invites a boy home for dinner. Her mother, Victoria, is determined to stop the relationship before it can start and encourages Nickie to focus on her destined gift for helping others. But Nickie, who's unaware of the curse, instead turns to her aunt, Willow, to learn love spells to keep her crush. As past mistakes and present secrets threaten to break the family, the secret of the curse's origin—and the only hope of breaking it—lies with Augusta, who is unable to speak after two strokes. Interspersed with flashbacks to 1950s New Orleans, this multiple POV narrative offers a holistic portrayal of voodoo practices, but doesn't offer as well-rounded a portrait of its heroines, who come off oddly flat. Still, for fans of intergenerational family dramas, this magical twist on the genre will prove refreshing.
Customer Reviews
Loved it !
I loved the whole thing and was sorry when it ended I felt like I got to know each of the characters and could relate to their struggles A great read
Major letdown
I tried so hard to get into this book but couldn’t. The constant changing of characters and time frames had me confused on who was who. By the time I feel it picked up I was uninterested.
This book felt like black history.
I loved this! The connection it brought to the black southern community is unmatched. Great read!