The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson
Erewhon Books, 2026
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1645663195
Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook
Buy:  Amazon.com  |  Bookshop.org

Hester Gardens is a housing project cursed by a history of violence, especially gun violence, and the residents are haunted by its victims.

Nona believed she was living a law-abiding life, until ten years ago, when she stumbled on her husband pistol-whipping a drug-addicted teenager to death in an alleyway and helped him cover it up. Now her husband is in prison for drug-dealing, and her oldest son is dead, a victim of a gang shooting. Her youngest son, Lance, is just starting to join in the activities of the local gang.

If only there were a way to escape Hester Gardens. It is possible– Nona’s nephew Harlan, an investigative journalist, made it out, and nursing student Kiandra is only held there by her younger brother.

Nona’s second son, recent high school graduate Marcus, has a ticket out, with a full scholarship to Brown University in the fall… if he can only make it through the summer. But Marcus, always the “good kid”, has a lot of anger and grief over Kendall’s murder, and he can’t quite keep it under the surface anymore. Thompson creates a disorienting atmosphere in Nona’s apartment, which already has an unstable feeling to it ,due to the disturbing changes in Marcus. It is just haunted enough to make her and her sons uneasy… until it suddenly escalates into a life-and-death situation.

Thompson’s talent is not just in creating an uncanny atmosphere, but in bringing the neighborhood and characters to life. There are ghosts… maybe… in the alleyways, and a smart person keeps a sharp eye out. While mainly told from Nona’s point of view, we also occasionally get the point of view of other characters: Harlan, Nona’s nephew; Lance, her youngest son and Marcus’ brother; Gretchen, Marcus’ girlfriend and gang leader Peter’s baby mama; Donnell, a gang member; Kiandra; and police officer Sgt. Victoria Prager, who was in charge of Kendall’s case and is involved in the ending of the terrible, shocking, night where six young people were silently executed with a rifle.

Readers will grow to care about, cheer for, and fear for characters who could easily have been cardboard cutouts. Gretchen, for instance, as a point of view character, is shaped by the trauma of having her twin murdered in a drive-by shooting right next to her and the stress of raising a child in an unpredictable environment. She’s much more fleshed out than she would be if we were limited to only Nona’s judgmental mindset. We get to see Donnell’s regrets and terror because he did not stop the execution of a boy about to escape Hester Gardens for college, and now can’t escape his ghost.  In a “closed community” like Hester Gardens, lives are entangled because everyone knows everyone: the same kids who were friends with your own kids, could grow up to be the killers of someone you loved, and Thompson does a great job of revealing that complexity. Thompson convincingly creates a claustrophobic and terrifying atmosphere: to escape Hester Gardens, its history of violence, and tangled relationships, isn’t easy. It’s a place that doesn’t want its residents to leave alive.

There’s a lot packed into these pages, and I found myself going back to this more than once. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski