Community Book Club—Black Candle Women by Diane Marie Brown

Are you looking to connect with others? Do you love reading all kinds of books? If you answered yes, the Community Book Club is for you!

This month’s book is Black Candle Women by Diane Marie Brown. 

Black Candle Women is Practical Magic meets The Mothers. This warm and wry family drama with a magical twist is about four generations of Black women, a family curse, and one very complicated year of heartache, miscommunication, and learning to let go. Generations of Montrose women—Augusta, Victoria, and Willow—have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. But when 17-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it’s even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies. Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. And as new truths about the curse emerge, the family is set on a collision course dating back to a Voodoo shop in 1950s New Orleans’s French Quarter—where a hidden story in a mysterious book may just hold the answers they seek in life and in love. 

“Propulsive and poignant, Black Candle Women concocts an intoxicating potion of warmth, wisdom, and wonder. I was completely and gladly under Ms. Brown’s spell.” says filmmaker Ava DuVernay. 

The Community Book Club meets every other Thursday evening, beginning March 30, via Zoom.

To register, send an email to community@iit.edu, and you will receive the meeting credentials.