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Jenna Bush Book Club Pick: A Cursed Family Saga
The second novel from Oyinkan Braithwaite, the breakout author of “My Sister, the Serial Killer,” offers a sweeping and sobering take on romantic fatalism.
Credit...Tracy Chahwan
Nov. 6, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
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CURSED DAUGHTERS, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
The real adventure in any fairy tale begins when the heroine breaks the rules. Rapunzel, imprisoned by a sorceress, forges a new life by falling in love with the prince who climbs her hair. Alice, trapped in Wonderland, has to defy the Queen of Hearts, who demands her beheading.
Oyinkan Braithwaite’s intriguing new …
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fiction
Jenna Bush Book Club Pick: A Cursed Family Saga
The second novel from Oyinkan Braithwaite, the breakout author of “My Sister, the Serial Killer,” offers a sweeping and sobering take on romantic fatalism.
Credit...Tracy Chahwan
Nov. 6, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
CURSED DAUGHTERS, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
The real adventure in any fairy tale begins when the heroine breaks the rules. Rapunzel, imprisoned by a sorceress, forges a new life by falling in love with the prince who climbs her hair. Alice, trapped in Wonderland, has to defy the Queen of Hearts, who demands her beheading.
Oyinkan Braithwaite’s intriguing new novel, “Cursed Daughters,” is a modern fable that shines in this danger zone — the part of its protagonists’ stories when they have to carve out lives for themselves under the shadow of a family curse.
Braithwaite, the author of the 2018 satirical thriller “My Sister, the Serial Killer,” kicks off her second novel with a stunning set piece: Monife Falodun, a young Nigerian woman who has been unlucky in love, takes her own life by walking into the ocean.
Ebun, her pregnant cousin, returns from Monife’s funeral to discover that her relatives have already removed all pictures of the dead girl from the family house. Before Ebun can confront them about this erasure, her water breaks. Her baby daughter, Eniiyi, much to her family’s delight and her own dismay, looks exactly like Monife.
Monife, it’s revealed early on, is also the one who told Ebun about the family curse: Years ago, when a Falodun ancestor seduced a married man, the man’s wife swore that she and all her descendants would be doomed to pursue lovers who will run “like water in their palms. … Your daughters, your daughters’ daughters and all the women to come will suffer for man’s sake.”
The novel that follows tells the interwoven stories of how Monife, Ebun and Eniiyi attempt to defeat that curse. Their journeys ask whether anyone can truly choose her own desires and fates, or whether everyone is relentlessly yolked to tradition.
The vignettes can be repetitive; there are only so many ways to lose a man. Yet a fairy tale requires rules, and the ways in which the older Falodun women fail at love let the younger women know what not to do. Most of the men in the book suffer from the same repetitiveness: They’re attractive and charming, but drawn thinly enough as to feel almost interchangeable.
The women themselves repeatedly question whether these dull love objects deserve to be fought for. At times, it feels as if their real curse is the abundance of men who don’t seem worth it. Yet as the narrative goes on, it becomes clear that the men aren’t the point. Our three female protagonists are rich, full characters. We go deep into their worlds as they struggle to reconcile their love for their family and culture with their desire to be free of the curse.
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It’s fascinating to watch them bob and weave. Monife starts out by disdaining all things superstitious, but after a love affair drives her to failed folklore remedies purchased from a local Yoruba priestess known as Mama G, she tries to find peace as a “side chick” before taking a final compelling turn toward darkness.
Ebun ditches the father of her child and avoids the Falodun home, convinced that spending less time there can save her from their obsession with the curse. But when her daughter, Eniiyi, starts to seem more and more like Monife, she lets her worst motherly instincts take control.
Eniiyi grows up to be a genetic counselor, in part because “she felt a kinship with individuals whose lives were spiraling because of something a relative had suffered” — only to fall in love with a man named Zubby whose links to her family go deeper than she knows.
That relationship, though, becomes one of the novel’s most heartwarming. Zubby even takes her to get a tattoo in an attempt to help her feel less like Monife’s carbon copy — “It’ll be another thing to set you apart from her, right?” — and gets one himself in solidarity: a Latin phrase that translates, ironically, to “the die is cast.”
Braithwaite’s prose is lush and spooky. The sun is “dry-eyed and unfeeling”; childbirth is like “going to sea and wondering if you would ever see land again.” A male suitor is described as “a sort of gate gnome, guarding the threshold and pining for the princess inside.”
The Falodun house may be the book’s most underrated character — luxurious yet haunted, with its six bedrooms spread across separate wings, its five generations of beloved family items (the pearl earrings of one “Grand-Aunty,” the dusty Bible of another) and its doors that swing themselves open at night.
Monife’s tragic fate is revealed at the beginning, but Ebun and Eniiyi manage to find another path, each beating back the curse with her own metaphorical sword. These are modern princesses who understand, finally, that life doesn’t grind to a halt after meeting Prince Charming.
CURSED DAUGHTERS | By Oyinkan Braithwaite | Doubleday | 384 pp. | $29
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