Her entry begins:
I recently reread Lindsey Stewart’s The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic which is such a seminal work of art that explores the essential contributions of black conjure women through American history in respect to spirituality and health. The book does an excellent job of tracing black wellness back to the southern plantation system where black women first practiced conjure magic to cure illnesses with herbal tinctures and mixtures, whose recipes have endured to this day. The book shows that these practices have lived on to shape positive counter narratives of power in the face of slavery and the Jim Crow era as well as...[read on]About The Quarter Queen, from the publisher:
A Voodoo witch must navigate a magically and racially divided nineteenth-century New Orleans to save her mother—and the soul of the city itself—in this lush debut novel inspired by the life of Marie Laveau.Visit Kayla Hardy's website.
In 1843 New Orleans, the reigning Voodoo queen is Marie Laveau, feared by her enemies and followers alike. Her daughter, Marie "Ree" Laveau the Second, is everything her cutthroat and principled mother is not—spoiled and entitled, with a wickedly rebellious streak—and defies her mother at every turn. But Ree’s world isturned upside down when she finds Marie comatose in the bayou, cursed by exiled Voodoo king Jon the Conjurer—Marie’s former teacher, lover, and greatest enemy.
As Marie hovers on the brink of death, Ree races to uncover the secrets of her mother’s life in search of a cure and gradually uncovers a web of alliances, dangers, and deception. What’s worse, Henryk Broussard, Ree’s long-missing childhood best friend, returns as a witch hunter of the Church, tasked with investigating her. With so many enemies circling, including a puritanical-minded Brotherhood of alchemists and the slave-holding mayor of the city, Ree must confront the past and face her mother’s demons that have now become her own—or die trying.
Told in alternating timelines between Ree in the present and Marie’s rise to power twenty-five years earlier, The Quarter Queen is an intimate yet epic portrait of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand one another, and a captivating exploration of racism, family, and womanhood.
The Page 69 Test: The Quarter Queen.
Q&A with Kayla Hardy.
My Book, The Movie: The Quarter Queen.
Writers Read: Kayla Hardy.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
