The Sleeping Sisters: A Novel
About this ebook
“A marvelously strange story of murder and motherhood. . . . I have no idea how to describe what I just read, but it was really, really cool.” —T. Kingfisher, author of What Moves the Dead
A mother’s love is the oldest curse
Fortuna Miércoles has finally moved her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande, desperate to outrun the curse that’s stalked her bloodline since her greatest grandmother crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But burying a family’s violent legacy—or her own haunting secret—isn’t so easy. Twenty years ago, girls and women vanished into the Albuquerque night, their bones later unearthed on the mesa. The so-called Reaper was never caught. Now, beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters, the killings have begun again, and they’ve called forth something in Fortuna that she has long fought to keep buried...
Detective Jeanette Palacio has spent decades promising justice to the ghosts of her murdered cousins—alongside the memory of the other women she couldn’t avenge. When a new body turns up in Fortuna’s backyard, both women are pulled into a dangerous, ancient plot. Are the Sleeping Sisters awakening—or has someone in Fortuna’s family set a trap?
Inspired by true events, The Sleeping Sisters begins as a taut mystery shot through with myth and a Chicana-Indigenous reimagining of the legend of the headless woman—but by its cataclysmic end has spiraled into a fevered, feral hymn to motherhood and a mesmerizing portrait of trauma and the monstrous bargains we make to protect those we love.
"A haunting mystery and a fierce ode to motherhood. It will lodge in your heart like a cactus spine.”―Nat Cassidy, author of When the Wolf Comes Home
"Givhan’s lovely prose brings incisive introspection to this pulse-pounding mystery with a mythic twist.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"It’s everything I love—a wily mystery, blood-stirring Indigenous folklore, and complicated ties to land and family.”―Laurie L. Dove, author of Mask of the Deer Woman
"A folkloric masterpiece. Givhan winds a story as supple and horrifying as a bloody silk ribbon, and the result is electrifying.”―Taylor Grothe, author of Lethal Kiss
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About the author
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. Givhan is the author of five full-length poetry collections and the novels River Woman, River Demon, Jubilee, Trinity Sight, and Salt Bones. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her family.
