Black Candle Women

Black Candle Women by Diane Marie Brown 368 pages

This novel was nothing like I expected. I expected a dual narrative, lots of voodoo/hoodoo/black magic and more New Orleans. Of course those expectations were based on one sentence at the end of the back over synopsis.

Thankfully, I wasn’t totally disappointed with the linear narrative, Black family life, generational trauma and a decades-old curse novel that I ended up reading.

Augusta Montrose fled New Orleans with her granddaughters after her spiritual mentor put a curse on the women in her family in the 1950s. Now it is current time. The curse has come true for Augusta and her oldest granddaughter, Victoria. The younger granddaughter, Willow, has managed to avoid it, but her life is spiraling towards it. Even Victoria’s great-granddaughter, seventeen-year-old Nickie is even barreling toward heartbreak and tears.

Although Victoria is not a licensed therapist, she runs a successful business out of their basement, using her special gift: being able to read people and talk with them through their troubles. She is highly respected in her African-American community. Her sister, Willow, has a side hustle going on that is steeped in the potions and powders she can make for the book of spells that Augusta brought from New Orleans.

Nickie is aware of the curse but does not feel that will be affect her. It is only after she is abandoned in a nearby hotel that Nickie comes to understand the consequences.

This story moved slowly. It just did not engage me as much as I thought it would based on the cover and synopsis. “Black Candle Women” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All

The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All  by Josh Ritter 304 pages

The protagonist of songwriter Josh Ritter’s second novel is ninety-nine-year-old Weldon Applegate, lying on his deathbed in a hospital. Tubes are coming out of his arms, and he is on oxygen. He seems to this reader to be passing in and out of consciousness.

When he is out of it, Weldon returns to the forests of Cordelia, Idaho, almost a century earlier; back to a time when he was a child and the Applegates were considered the best lumberjacks in the industry. When his head is clear, he recounts a life of murder, mayhem, avalanches, bootlegging and all sorts of axe-swinging adventures.

Weldon’s father, Tom, was a lumberjack who promised his wife that he'd stay safe and never jack again. After his wife dies, he and Weldon move to Cordelia, a town full of lumberjacks and near the Lost Lot, a cursed tract of land that Tom owns. Tom works in the town general store but finds himself making a deal with a larger-than-life lumberjack-of-legend, Linden Laughlin, who turns out to be a devil in disguise. Weldon tells us the whole story in tall-tale style from those times through when technology and industry take over.

The story structure follows Weldon’s mental state, moving from one adventure to another without any division. I found this hard to follow. The language is rough, but realistic for the time period. It didn’t bother me, but I just didn’t like the story. For me, the action moved a snail’s pace, but I think it was me and not the story. I wasn’t as drawn in as I had hoped to be, but I will admit to learning a lot about lumberjacking. Therefore, “The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All” receives 2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

 

Cartier's Hope

Cartier's Hope  by M.J.Rose  336 pages

M. J. Rose has written twenty previous novels, and this one may be her best one yet. This time she takes us back to 1910 -1911 New York and the Gilded Age. She writes about the Suffrage Movement, pay equality, treatment equality, betrayal, undercover journalism and the world’s most famous, and most cursed, diamond, the Hope Diamond. Plus a little romance is thrown in for good measure.

Although the Hope Diamond now resides in National Gem and Mineral Collection at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D. C., it was originally housed at New York’s Cartier Jewelry Story in New York. I’ve seen in on display, and it is stunning. I can’t imagine wearing it, much less owning it. Last time I checked the gem was valued at $350 million.

But I digress. While this novel revolves around the Hope, it is a story of one a courageous young women, Vera Garland, who turns her nose up at the high society into which she was born, much to her mother’s chagrin. She wants to make a difference in the world, and she has dedicated her life to trying to right some of the worlds’ wrongs by becoming a journalist.

Writing under the pen name of Vee Swann, Vera has disguised her natural beauty and taken an apartment in the less-than-wealthy area, not all that far from where her family currently resides. Vera/Vee is taking a break. While writing a story, she became attached to one of the people she was writing about and it ended tragically.  She is also reeling from the recent deaths of her beloved Uncle Percy, her mother’s brother, and her adored father, the only person who truly understood her and encouraged her to follow her dreams.

Holed up in her late father’s penthouse high above the store he founded, Vera/Vee is nursing her wounds. In the library, she discovers her father’s deepest secret. I can’t say much more, but Vera believes her father to have been blackmailed.  She plans to get her revenge by using the one thing all of New York is talking about: the Hope Diamond.

The only complaint I have about this intriguing and captivating novel is that, sometimes, when author Rose was providing backstory on the diamond, it was a little much. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Therefore,  “Cartier’s Hope” receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.