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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Shea Ernshaw comes a haunting romantic contemporary fantasy about a teen navigating her family’s love curse that blooms with their enchanted tulips every year.Seventeen year-old Lark Goode wants only one to escape her small town of Cutwater and the history of her family name. It’s a history that began during the Dutch tulip mania of 1636, when Lark’s ancestor stole the last remaining tulip bulbs and fled to America. But when the tulips bloomed on American soil, madness sprouted from their snowy white petals. The madness was love. Now, generations later, the Goodes remain cursed—the unnatural flowers outside their home causing locals to fall helplessly in love with anyone carrying Goode blood in their veins. While her brother embraces the strange power, Lark wants nothing more than to be free from it. But when she meets a boy who seems unaffected by the family curse, Lark finds herself falling headlong into a feeling she’s spent her whole life trying to avoid. Yet, all curses and magic come with a price, and the town of Cutwater soon sinks into a dangerous sickness tied to Lark and the ill-fated tulips. To save the town, Lark will need to sacrifice everything—even true love—to break the spell. Because in the Goode family, love has a way of destroying everything.
Publication Year: 2025
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~~Thank you to Edelweiss and Simon & Schuster for the ARC!~~
This was just frustratingly mind numbing.
I went into this hoping we'd learn more about the tulips, about the love magic and possibly trying to "break the curse." But NO. The majority of this book is Lark going ga-ga over Oak, the stupidly named love interest, angsting over her mommy issues, and hating on the tulips (And the concept of love by extension). That's it. It's just those three points over and over again until the book ends. Nothing is explored about the tulips other than questioning if the magic was even real, and that's thrown to the wall when Lark hangs on to the last tulip as insurance that Oak stays in love with her. She spends this whole book not believing Oak genuinely liked her because of those tulips, only for her to regress and use them anyway! What was the point of this whole book questioning the nature of love if the main character themselves proves she can't experience love without her family's flowers?
If anything, it shows that, without the love power, Lark can't pull anyone because all her personality consists of is mommy issues and her constant whine about her family's curse but never doing anything meaningful to fix it. I hate that this book has legitimately mad me this upset.
Also, another red flag about this book: Oak's favorite author is Jack Kerouac, whom I personally despise due to reading On the Road. Yeah, no, screw this guy and this whole book.
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