Summary

Black Candle Women opens as the matriarch of the Montrose family, Augusta, travels via plane from California back to the place of her birth, New Orleans. In addition to feeling anxiety because she is taking a plane for the first time, Brown makes it clear that Augusta, and maybe the rest of the women in her family, has unfinished business in New Orleans. Augusta is being “called back” to the city, which will never let her rest. Augusta is identified as isolated, her family, “a private kind of people, had to keep others out to keep the secrets in” (9). Augusta is traveling back to New Orleans because her granddaughter has fallen in love and she means to seek out the source of the family curse to set her granddaughter and the rest of the women in her family free.

Chapter 1 follows Victoria...