THE HAUNTING OF MAGNOLIA WOODS
“There’s a worn path from all the girls who’ve come before you…”
Synopsis: For generations, girls have entered Magnolia Woods on the eve of their seventeenth birthday with a question on their lips. They may ask the ghost girl of the woods any question, but only one, and she will answer it.
When MAGGIE, a Lumbee girl, goes into the woods, prompted by a mysterious letter found in an old family Bible, she asks a question no one’s ever asked before.
The question rattles more than either girl bargained, raising past curses, malevolent shadows, and the forest’s protectors. What Maggie finds in the woods sends her, along with the help of her maybe sweetheart (if she’ll let him be) and the healer she apprentices under, on a hunt through libraries, colonial sites, and the past of her own family and tribe.
The answers she finds shake what she knew about herself and her tribe, making her question both her past and future. But as secrets unravels, the Darkness grows and follows her, can Maggie solve the secrets and break the curse before its too late?
THE HAUNTING OF MAGNOLIA WOODS is a dual timeline, multiple points of view novel set in the 1950s (Maggie), 1750s (Sophia), and the woods (anachronistic) in the sandhills of North Carolina.
It explores themes of identity, race, generational trauma/curses, and colonization.
Project Status: Drafting
Comps: The Ten Thousand Doors of January meets The Lost Apothecary, A History of Wild Places
Want to read more? Check out story snippets, behind the scenes, my writing process, and pictures from my research trip in #thehauntingofmagnoliawoods.
“There’s a girl that lives in the woods. Or so they say, no one’s seen or heard her in a hundred years, but she’s there. You can hear her in the breeze, feel the flutter of her hem as she runs past, hear her laugh echoing in the babbling brook.”