Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Braithwaite’s newest has all the sharpness of her debut, My Sister the Serial Killer, alongside the complexity and character development a longer book permits, and my goodness was I desperate to talk about this story and its characters with someone after I put it down.
Cursed Daughters has the sweeping feel of a saga without plunging into deep historical fiction. It manages to be epic without traveling very far in locale with most of the story set in the Falodun home, where so many daughters stricken with a generations-old curse that breaks their hearts and promises a lifetime of loneliness have wound up. Shifting between the perspectives of three of these daughters–cousins Monife and Ebun, and Ebun’s daughter, Eniiyi–we learn about the women who came before them, the fallout of seemingly inevitable broken marriages and romances, and the torment the three endure beneath the shadow of the Falodun family curse.
The mythical elements of the story feel less speculative and more familiar, especially if the otherworldly permeates your own culture (the fantastic is made real in my own maternal family’s stories about life in Singapore). Like Mo, Ebun, and Eniiyi, the reader wrestles with the questions of whether they are actually cursed, or whether their belief in the story and their parents’ actions skew their perspective and motivate them toward sabotage, whether trifling men are the real problem, or all of the above. Portents, symbols, and the inexplicable corroborate the idea that something beyond coincidence is at work, marking this tragic and ultimately invigorating romantic tale with magic.