In this Southern Gothic horror novel, Mira returns to her small Southern hometown to attend a plantation wedding. This plantation, of course, has a dark history overall, but Mira and one of her friends also had an unsettling experience there as children, when the plantation was abandoned. Old secrets, old loves, old traumas, you know the drill.
I really struggled with this novel and I hate to be dismissive about a book that is about the generational trauma of slavery and racism, but I just didn’t take to the characters here at all really. I hate to be the guy bashing a book because it isn’t a completely different book, but I feel like there’s a tremendous amount of potential in a horror novel about the “modern plantation” experience, you know the tourism and romanticism that surrounds Southern plantations. There’s just so much there and I feel like, of all the possible stories, LaTanya McQueen tells the least interesting one. Mira just isn’t a compelling character and McQueen is constantly bringing up small side stories and then just dealing with them in a paragraph or even just a couple of sentences and then moving on. Early in the book, Mira wonders what it must be like to work at one of these tourist-destination plantations as a person of color, essentially putting on a minstrel show for the benefit of white tourists in a place of oppression and trauma. And that’s a story I’d love to read, about the psychological trauma of that, but instead of even just having a supporting character in that vein, we’re just back to Mira trying to hook up with her old boyfriend. There’s a very weird sex scene, by the way. Feels really out of place. The prose also just . . . isn’t great. Not awful, but not great.
The book has moments. The best bit is an extended time travel and/or vision of the past that takes Mira back to the unspeakable “glory” days of the plantation in the heyday of the slave trade; that sequence is profoundly disturbing and genuinely frightening. Like I say, there’s a lot of potential for the horror genre in slavery. This one just fails to live up to that potential most of the time. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – horror novel set at a modern “tourist-destination” plantation lacks focus and compelling characters; fails to live up to its potential. 1 ½ stars.