THE PLOT: ‘Black Candle Women’ by Diane Marie Brown is a contemporary novel about modern witches. Three generations of the Montrose women live together in California, their delicate peace underpinned by the voodoo magic they share. Yet the Montrose women are living with a curse, which echoes back to their ancestors from New Orleans’ French Quarter – anyone they fall in love with will die. When 17-year-old Nickie brings home a boy for the first time, her mother, Victoria, and great-grandmother, Augusta, fear the curse will show itself and kill the boy. While Aunt Willow and Grandmother Madelyn don’t believe in the curse, the family implodes and each woman must revisit their past choices.

RATING: I must start this review by stating that I bear no ill-will towards the author of this book. My page exists to support and uplift Black women, particularly debuts, and I wish her the best in her career. But I have to keep my reviews honest. And, honestly, I *hated* this book. Disclaimer – I DNF’d around page 200 (of c.350), but I feel like I read enough to write a full review. Everything about the blurb, the cover and the positioning of this book made me expect to love it. However, I strongly feel that there was no plot to this novel. It feels like it’s going round in circles, telling you the same information about the characters’ backstories but barely moving forward. I could forgive this lack of plot with lyrical, literary writing, but the sentences feel slow and heavy. Overall, it feels like this book doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. Is it literary or commercial? Magical or real life? Dual timeline or present day? It straddles too many things and ends up being nothing to anyone. I had so much hope for this book and the characters and premise are captivating so I hate criticising it. However, the lack of communication between the characters feels nonsensical and the lack of character development is frustrating. Sadly, although I see the potential in this story, I have to give it two stars.

GOOD BITS: My favourite sections were great-grandmother Augusta’s memories of the past and how she came to learn voodoo and leave New Orleans. These were the only active passages where it felt like events were having a cause-and-effect relationship and building on each other to create a narrative. I almost feel like a stronger delineation between the past and present, perhaps with a clear dual timeline, would have served the story better as most of the relevant information was depicted in backstory. My favourite characters were Madelyn and Willow, both of whom don’t believe in the curse and are more ‘active’ and less in their own heads due to their determination to live without fear.

NOT SO GOOD BITS:  This book suffers from a serious case of interesting characters with nothing to do. Each of the women’s characterisation is strong and there’s a lot of atmosphere, but they go round in circles without any development. Usually, I enjoy short chapters that alternate POV, but I felt like each POV simply reiterated the same information about the family curse so it never moved the story forward. I also felt frustrated with Victoria as she refuses to tell her daughter about the curse but tries to trick her into not falling in love. I don’t think this lack of communication makes sense and her desire to keep the family voodoo secret is at odds with her desire for Nickie to take over the family “gift”. The motivation feels inconsistent and therefore the actions feel stagnant as they constantly contradict each other.

OVERALL: I’m so sorry but I can’t recommend this book. However, I would love to discuss it with others to challenge my opinion and highlight if I missed something. In summary, I would say this book failed to deliver on the promise of the premise. It simply did not live up to the blurb.

This is a bit cheeky but if it were me, I would have written this a dual timeline with the “past” narrated by Augusta and Madelyn and the “present” narrated by Willow and Nickie. I would’ve moved between past and present every c.4chapters (2 chapters per POV) and made Madelyn’s return a bigger reveal, potentially at the midpoint. I would set the whole book in New Orleans and strengthened the magic to heighten the atmosphere. Telling Nickie about the curse would be an inciting incident that would send Nickie on a quest to a) find a missing spellbook and/or b) find Bella Nova to break the curse so she could be with her true love. Madelyn and Willow would have a subplot that interconnected, probably about their relationships with Men (perhaps Willow’s father and Nickie’s father). Victoria’s boring-ass POV could be shown through her conversations with Nickie and Willow, leaving the reader ambiguous about her motivation which might help mask the inconsistencies (unreliable narrator type-ting).