Status Updates From The Curse of Hester Gardens

A lot happening. Heartfelt. Questions and now maybe some ghosts and thoughts and feelings from the past. Portents of a future well written and not over re-hashing to much history. Here and now.

Received from a Goodreads giveaway!

Nona experiences intense dread like everything “was about to go wrong again.”

“Being scared doesn’t mean you’re losing your mind.”

Nona believes there was an intruder in her house, pilot lights the stove by itself 👀

“...She thought of him shooting the squirrel. She remembered the bloody animal darting away, Marcus’s erection, and the way he pulled her to him as if she’d become his prey and he wanted to draw her blood.”

👁️👄👁️

“She knew every family who lived in the Gardens. Hell, she’d slept with most of them—the sons and the married dads.”

Girl

“Pulsating breath, hot, damp, emanated from the darkness behind her and spread across her nape and back. Someone was standing behind her, exhaling warm air down her spine. The exhalation meant she couldn’t chalk this up to her imagination. Someone, something was really there, moving wisps of her hair with its quiet panting.”

😬

‘It was impossible for her and Pastor Davis to be around each other without the two of them smiling brightly. She’d noticed it. He’d noticed it. He often said to her, “I think we managed to find our soulmate at the wrong time.”And she’d correct, “More like our kindred spirit.”’

Oh come on

Marcus could've waived his class registration fee due to financial hardship but he just... Didn't?? And now he owes Brown a thousand bucks??

From one former poor to another, I was rooting for you!!

“...He was often affectionate with her, but recently, the closer they got to Marcus leaving home, the more Pastor’s affection felt like courting, like he was preparing to move into her life as soon as Marcus moved out. She shouldn’t have allowed him, a married man and the pastor of her church, to carry on this way, but she enjoyed the physical touch, the companionship, the undivided attention.”

I'm judging

“And in one unit, out front, folks move in but don’t make it past one night. They run out screamin’, cussin’, scatterin’ half their shit—clothes, cash, phones—across the grass as they leave. Say they woke up at night and found a bloody boy about seven sitting on the end of their bed giggling and holding his head, where his brains were spilling out.”

Oh hell NAH

“...The air reeked of her mother and father in the moments before they passed, when they were in the liminal space between the living realm and the next, with the heat leaving them, sweat gathering under their arms, and feces leaking into the mattress beneath them.”

A tad too descriptive for me 🤢

No teenager in 2016 is calling it a rubber 💀🫩

That morgue scene 😭😭😭😭😭

This dialogue is 🙈 but the story is 😭