Erin Crosby Eckstine
At a glance
A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms.
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.
When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.
With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?
"Eckstine combines the lyricism of Jesmyn Ward and Toni Morrison with the speculative historical fiction of Tananarive Due and Leslye Penelope in a stunning debut that will also appeal to fans of Percival Everett’s James."
- Booklist, starred review 🌟
"Propulsive and haunting, young Junie takes on the many burdens handed to her while reaching for the hope she wasn’t meant to have. Erin Crosby Eckstine breathes urgency, wit, and resilience into her preternaturally gifted protagonist. Junie is a lush and immersive story about power, reckoning, love, and redemption… A true beauty of a book."
- Diane Marie Brown, author of Black Candle Women
"The richly textured prose quickly pulled me into the protagonist’s treacherous yet magical world. I was drawn to the story of Junie, an enslaved teenager with a love of books and nature who must navigate difficult truths about her family and friendships in order to survive her times."
- Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake
Junie wakes up in the red mud, listening to the water that slithers between the rocks in the creek. The faint first light of sunrise slips through the gray moss tangled between black oak branches. The sunshine’s needle points warm her bare legs as mud cools her from below. The earth’s smell is enchanting after the rain, sharp, metallic, and sickening if you inhale too long, like copper pots on a humid day. The mud takes what should be hard and makes it soft, what should be finished and makes it raw.
The distant crack of the foreman’s whip tells her she’s not supposed to be here.
She can’t get to her feet fast enough. Instinct makes her rub the wrinkles out of her moth-eaten nightdress, but in doing so, she coats it in caked red mud until she is crimson streaked like Granddaddy’s pants after he slaughters a pig.
The whip cracks again. There is no time to fix it.
August’s humidity swarms her like yellow jackets. She runs, trying to ignore the pounding in her head and the stinging in her bare feet, from stepping on cracked twigs and pointed rocks. The woods are thinning out now; she can see the field and the sun through a gap in the trees.
Slavery, domestic abuse, sexual abuse (off-page).
