Everyone in the town of Mill Haven knows her as the rich girl her workaholic parents see her as their good child.

Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.Ī gut-wrenching look at how addiction affects a family and a town.Įmory Ward, 16, has long been invisible. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible-if they have the courage to act. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices.

But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). YA)Ī devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.Ĭady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. (historical notes, list of sources) (Fantasy. Gritty details of the civil-rights movement and Dahomey (and world-wide) history of slavery form a powerful story that’s archetypal, magical, and realistic all at once. With a few friends and family around her-including seven-year-old cousin Gisele, who may be the next warrior woman-Ruba faces Zashar, the hurricane, and the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, Mississippi is rife with racial violence. Now Hurricane Camille (possibly the worst storm to make land in American meteorological history) is bearing down, and Ruba knows Zashar’s inside it. With Ba dead, Ruba’s the only warrior woman left.

In Haiti, Ba taught Ruba how to conjure winds to fight evil Zashar, a stormwitch with an ancient grudge against their ancestors of Dahomey (Benin). She moved there to live with her unfamiliar, Christian paternal grandmother because her maternal grandmother who raised her in Haiti has died. Sixteen-year-old Ruba’s been in Pass Christian, a Mississippi coastal town, for three weeks. Haitian conjuring and American historical fiction boldly weave together weather, magic, religion, and ancestral history.

Stormwitch by Susan Vaught