Healing comes at a price—that’s the godfearing truth. Growing up on a farm in the foothills, Sierra Branham is used to that bitterness in her granny’s folk magic and father’s addiction. But when her dad misses her graduation after finally getting clean, she’s sure it’s something darker than his usual pills.

After tracking her dad’s last-known location to a methadone clinic, Sierra meets Blight, an intoxicating and infuriating nonbinary caseworker. With Blight comes answers about Sierra’s dad and questions about her sexuality as they work with the clinic’s harm reduction program. While exploring their relationship and the opioid-riddled underworld, they discover a disease creeping through users’ veins like kudzu—and it looks a whole lot more like Granny’s magic than any ordinary infection.

Though her family’s folk healing seems to be at the heart of the outbreak, Sierra hesitates to take on her dark inheritance. Sure, it might give power and privilege enough to confront the drugs and disease, but it’s also what fuels cycles of addiction, abuse, and exploitation. As infectious iron rusts through the bodies of those she loves and surging kudzu threatens to bury the family’s hateful history once and for all, Sierra must decide which monsters to slay and which to become.

Publication

US: Holiday House