Queen Killer: 1

Tananarive Due meets N.K. Jemisin, with Octavia Butler's body-politics, Nalo Hopkinson's diasporic myth, and the tragic romantic gravity of Kennedy Ryan at her darkest.A woman throws her son onto a fence and her daughter into a fountain. Afterward, she requests a cold drink and a replacement.The fountain.The daughter requires a grave.You will understand the woman before this story is finished. Take no comfort in that. Understanding has never made a terrible thing less terrible. It merely leaves you without the refuge of ignorance.I could tell you of the humans taking a land that does not belong to them. I could tell you of a king remade upon a human table, who aids the invaders and calls it progress. I could tell you of the new wife who knows nothing of the family buried beneath her marriage and remains certain she has chosen the perfect man. I could tell you of the queen who laid the children she ordered dead within her own courtyard, because she deemed every other patch of earth unworthy of holding them.Drawing from African American history and folklore-and the depths of her own imagination-Kyra Lumpkin has written a saga of conquest, family, power, and survival. Defiant of categorization and populated by unforgettable women, Queen Killer is familiar, profound, and Black as fuck.They are not the story.The story is a child who holds a power the gods withheld for a thousand years. A girl capable of wearing every face upon this world, with Soulaan's deliverance resting in her tiny hands.By the final page, she will have no family, no home, and a price on her back.And that is just where she needs to be.