The Curse of Hester Gardens

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson is not your typical haunted house story. Hester Gardens is an entire neighborhood/housing project that is haunted not only by poverty, drugs, and gun violence, but also by at least one spirit.

Although we do have housing projects in rural Appalachia, my primary touchpoint for comparison to Hester Gardens is Candyman’s Cabrini-Green, though Hester Gardens is fictional and placed in Medford, MI vs. the very real Cabrini-Green in Chicago.

Nona McKinley lives with her husband and their three sons, getting by and trying to save a little money so they can buy a standalone house of their own. All is going according to plan until she witnesses her husband beat a man to death near their home, and her life unravels.

Soon, her husband is in prison, her oldest son has died from a gunshot wound, and she is hearing noises in her apartment and seeing strange shadowy figures in the neighborhood.

All she wants to do is make sure her now-oldest son Marcus gets to Brown in the autumn, where he has earned a full ride, and that her youngest son, still in middle school, stays out of the trouble he’s heading for long enough to achieve something similar.

Nona is not perfect; she’s having an affair with her married pastor, for example, but that just makes her feel more real, and we still want to see her and what’s left of her family get a happy ending.

Suffice to say, I couldn’t read to the end fast enough to see what the curse was all about and how it all turns out for them. Along the way, The Curse of Hester Gardens has some quite creepy moments, not to mention some very sad ones.

I listened to the audiobook for this one, and Jasmin Walker perfectly embodied Nona and brought the story to life.

Thank you to NetGalley, Kensington Publishing, and RBMedia for the advance copies for my honest review.