I know I’m a wee little bebe in the horror genre and everything, but this was exactly the type of horror book that I was hoping to find, and I hope to find more like it as I continue to dip my toes in the genre. I didn’t think it was scary (I don’t find ghosts frightening), but it did make me mad. As it was meant to!
A Black woman named Mira, now a teacher in another state, is going back to her hometown for the first time for her former best friend Celine’s wedding. She and the friend, along with their friend Jesse (who is also Black, and Celine is white) were very close growing up, but something traumatic pulled them apart. It’s all centered on the ruined plantation abutting their small town. But now the plantation has been bought by a millionaire and converted into a sort of “historical” resort/park hybrid. Celine is having her wedding there, and Mira can’t believe it, not only because of the actual history of the place, but because of her and Jesse’s personal history there as well. She finds herself there on the day anyway.
Oh, also have I mentioned that nearly everyone agrees that the plantation is haunted?
I was actually pretty close to giving this one five stars (or at least 4.5) but then the last quarter of the book didn’t really work for me. Up until then, the way that the author was weaving together parallels between antebellum spooky flashbacks and their current day racist legacies was really, really working for me. I had to stop reading about halfway through to cool off, the ghosts were so effective in getting their points across.
But the end was really a rushed mess. I had to read a handful of paragraphs two or three times just to understand what was happening in the story. Things were happening way too fast, and transitions were either very missable, or not there at all. This made me sad because a great, non-rushed ending really could have pulled this together perfectly, but in the end I just ended up having a good time with it instead of a great one.