“Victoria flipped the switch in her closet, the sharp light finding the carpet between boxes and bags, and candles, a hefty black one in the middle. Victoria, anxious to keep the status quo, goes to the altar hidden in her room. The Montrose women, well versed in Vodou from their New Orleans rearing, turn to those practices after Felix visits. Victoria sees Felix as a threat, someone who could derail Nickie’s career as a top student and lead her to explore her sexuality. The women’s buttoned-down living succeeds until Nickie brings home Felix, a boy she likes and with whom she has classes, to help celebrate her 17th birthday.
Victoria hasn’t told Nickie about the curse, not wanting to burden her with it until she’s more mature.
The women live careful quiet lives because they fear a curse that means death for any man who loves them. The Montrose women, New Orleans transplants to southern California, include: 40-ish Victoria, a therapist who owns the quaint two-story bungalow where the family lives and where she sees patients her 30-something sister Willow, who works as Victoria’s receptionist and who has helped raise Victoria’s daughter, Nickie, 16 and August, Victoria’s and Willow’s grandmother. The women in “Black Candle Women,” a just-published novel by Diane Marie Brown, find themselves in that predicament. Includes playlist and reading group guide.When several generations of women from the same family reside under one roof, it can force old secrets to surface. And as new questions about long-held family beliefs emerge, the women are set on a collision course dating back to a voodoo shop in 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.". For each member of the household, revealing this truth to Nickie also means reckoning with their own past choices and mistakes. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it's even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies. But when seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. "Generations of Montrose women-Augusta, Victoria, Willow-have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years.
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