The ghosts haunting Hester Gardens are terrifying, but they’re nowhere near the scariest thing its residents have to survive. The Curse of Hester Gardens takes supernatural horror and puts it alongside poverty, gun violence, grief, and the desperation of a mother trying to keep her children alive. I went into this expecting a haunted-house story and got something much heavier, angrier, and more emotional.

Nona McKinley has already lost one son. Her oldest, Campbell, was shot and killed at eighteen, her husband is in prison, and now everything she does revolves around making sure her two remaining sons escape Hester Gardens.

Marcus is supposed to be the one who makes it. He's a valedictorian headed for an Ivy League school. Lance, meanwhile, is getting closer to the same kind of life Nona has desperately tried to keep her children away from.

And then Hester Gardens starts getting stranger. People hear footsteps when nobody is there. Appliances turn themselves on. Residents encounter people who shouldn't be walking around anymore. Even Marcus begins behaving like someone Nona barely recognizes.

I loved the way the supernatural horror exists alongside the real-world horror rather than replacing it. Hester Gardens is literally haunted, but its residents are also trapped by systems that have failed them over and over again. Poverty, neglected housing, violence, incarceration, and the lack of opportunities available to these families are every bit as threatening as whatever is lurking inside their homes.

That made the ghosts feel like more than something added just to make the book scary. The entire community feels haunted by what has happened there. Violence leaves something behind. Grief leaves something behind. The choices people make to survive leave something behind.

Nona was easily the heart of the book for me. She's complicated and makes choices I didn't always agree with, but I understood the desperation behind so many of them. There’s this constant question running through the story of what you would be willing to do if you genuinely believed it was the only way to protect your children.

My main issue was the pacing. This is definitely a slow burn, and at 448 pages, there were stretches where I wanted things to move a little faster. The supernatural elements take their time building while the family and community remain the focus.

But once everything began connecting, I understood why so much time had been spent establishing Hester Gardens and the people living there. The horror wouldn't mean nearly as much without caring about the community first.