The Carrefour Curse (CBR16 #7)

There are two tasks in the Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books (and others that are for a picture book, YA book by a trans author, and YA non-fiction) and works intended for readers on the younger than YA end of the spectrum are basically non-existent on my to read list so I had to do some research to find books to read. By and large, libraries can be relied upon to point you in good directions, so I went hunting for options and Arlington Public Library had a handy-dandy list of books that went under the radar in 2023 (yet another Read Harder Task) broken down into genres.  

One of those was middle grade books and as I was on the hunt for two, I went looking for titles I would be interested in. One that jumped out to me immediately was The Carrefour Curse by Dianne K. Salerni, which the author describes as being her homage to Dark Shadows and the Goodreads blurb describes as “The Addams Family meets The Westing Game in this exhilarating mystery about a modern magical dynasty trapped in the ruins of their once-grand, now-crumbling ancestral home.” Count me in, that should do nicely for middle grades horror. 

The Carrefour Curse juggles a few different horror tropes for its audience. We follow twelve-year-old Garnet Carrefour as she and her mother are summoned to the family home she has never seen as the patriarch’s health is failing. Her family is full of magic users in each of the earth elements, named for their area of specialization, but the family and house are encircled by death, which often comes in multiples. Garnet learns the family secret: her dying great-grandfather is stealing life power from others, lengthening his own life. But that isn’t the only problem Garnet discovers, unearthing an even deeper curse polluting the family’s magic and making people disappear.  

Middle grade horror is an interesting little nook in the literature universe since middle grade works do not include profanity, graphic violence, or sexuality, which tend to show up quite a lot in other horror genres. But they tend to focus on the characters’ friends, family, and immediate surroundings and there’s plenty of horror in interpersonal dynamics, especially once you throw in a magical family who is seemingly cursed. I enjoyed the magic of the Carrefour family and the complexities of how the curse and dangers are layered by Salerni. I think there was probably one or two too many characters to mentally juggle, but this was an enjoyable, while slightly spooky, read.  

The Ex Hex (CBR14 #18)

When I started reading this book it wasn’t very far in before I was thinking to myself “hmm… I’m not sure he’s such a bad guy, ladies” as Vivienne is (accidentally) drunkenly hexing her ex, Rhys. This could be a function of any number of things including my age, my own romantic history, the fact that I waited three months on my library’s hold list for it, and the general state of the world. But it did affect my enjoyment because the thing I noticed by page five didn’t play out on page until about 85% in and kept scratching at the back of my mind. So… my 3.5 rounded up might resonate with you or leave you scratching your head – so fair warning.

The good news for me was that the vodka drunk hexing chapter is a prologue set nine years in the past, so we fast-forward from 19-year-old Vivi to 28-year-old Vivi and that version of her is much more put together, emotionally. She’s a lecturer at the university in town, back to living in her adopted hometown where her aunt and cousin run a witchy shop. Oh, and they’re all witches. The University even has a separate, hidden in plain sight, Witch program. Graves Glen, Georgia secretly houses a bunch of witches, was founded by witches, and has ley lines running through which help power the magic its witch resident use. Every year in October is Founder’s Day which features a huge fall festival and the tourists come to town following a decade long rebrand as a fall getaway by the town’s mayors. Unfortunately, this year’s festival is interrupted by the aforementioned accidental curse when Vivi’s ex and descendent of the town founder, Rhys Penhallow arrives from Wales to recharge the ley lines and attend Founder’s Day in his father’s place. Once Rhys is in town… the hex takes effect and magic begins to go haywire, eventually getting into the lay lines and effecting the entire town. But lifting the curse becomes a problem, and things get serious including a real threat to Rhys’ life.

There is a lot happening in this book, and the good news is that Sterling handles it well and is genuinely funny, writing characters with undeniable chemistry. The relationships between the characters, familial or romantic, all felt very real, as did the lingering hurt of young heartbreak. I struggled with the pacing a bit, there’s a lot of worldbuilding to lay in for both protagonists, their families, and the town itself before you get to Sterling’s version of magic (which I liked). It builds over the course of the first half in a imminently readable way (I devoured this book in one day) but we pay the price in the second half. The book is predominantly set between October 12 and October 31, we spend half the book leading up to October 13, and then the second half with the remaining two weeks, skipping over chunks of time and character development. We get it in passing, in reference to what happened off page, but with characters with such great chemistry who fell for each other intensely nearly a decade ago but broke up after three months on a blow up, and have been back in each other’s lives a matter of weeks… I felt we needed the time to see the new era of their relationship develop. Sterling sold it without, but it could have been so much better with even fifty additional pages (moving this book from 300 to 350, not uncommon in the Romance world).  

I’m interested to see what Sterling writes next under this pen name (she’s also Rachel Hawkins) as she continues in this universe and adult Romance.

The Last Smile in Sunder City (CBR12 #55)

I’ll admit, while I’d seen Lisa Bee’s review of this earlier this year, the book didn’t really land on my radar until I watched Black Sails over the summer and it was mentioned that Luke Arnold who plays John Silver had written this as well as a sequel that came out this year, and that he did the audio version himself. I was suitably lured in by this info and many thanks to crystalclear for getting me the audio version. The book tells the story of a former soldier turned PI who tries to help the fantasy creatures whose lives were ruined in a world that’s lost its magic.

As a debut, The Last Smile in Sunder City is a good book. It’s a good book by really any metric, but it isn’t great and that made me sad because there’s a lot here that could have been great. It also made me stall out for six weeks and read other things or just listen to podcasts in the car. The Last Smile in Sunder City is an urban fantasy that’s also a private eye/detective story. It’s also a story of what happens to an urban space when its source of power (in this case, magic) is gone. Arnold has a lot of good imagination and world building happening here, but the story’s ability to hold my attention came and went with the plotting, and that bummed me out. The backstories of the war, and our main character Fetch’s growing up pulled me in, as did the aftereffects of the war and what it cost everyone but most specifically the magical creatures – but I struggled to sink into the actual mystery the book was supposed to be about – finding a missing vampire.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep reading this series, but Arnold is a good enough writer that I’m intrigued.