“Explores the simmering rage passed through four generations of emotionally stunted southern ‘ladies’ . . . A nearly perfect first novel . . . deeply moving” (Kirkus Reviews).
In 1959, seven-year-old Sarah Grissom is the victim of a prank. Her brother and her cousins pretend there’s a ghost in the attic of their grandmother’s big, rambling East Texas house, and they take Sarah up to meet it. It’s just a game for the others, but Sarah senses a frightening thing there, a presence. Is it a ghost? Without a doubt there is something—something cold, something deadly—lurking in the Northgate attic . . .
The Waking Spell is a penetrating look at the specter that has haunted the women of this East Texas family since the late 1890s, when Sarah’s vain, well-bred great-grandmother found herself plunged suddenly into a raw, rough-edged wilderness across the Red River from civilization. It was a place where no one understood manners, proper sentiments, or refinement—where the only thing a proper lady could do was retreat into silence and secrets. Over the years since, silence and secrets have become an unspoken rule, an invisible bond of repression and frustration passed down from mother to daughter.
Following Sarah’s long journey through her family’s history to confront the malignant silence that has haunted the lives of the Northgate women for nearly a century, this “finely crafted, atmospheric” novel reveals the angers and passions that lurk behind ladylike sweetness and smiles. The author’s “evocative powers and poetic eye make the long, hot days and twilights of a Texas summer come alive in a book to be savored and shared” (Publishers Weekly).
