Rooted In The Backwoods

Two strangers are about to discover what happens when your past doesn’t care to stay in the past.

Chade is 32, sharp-witted with one foot in the mystical world and the other in the ruins of a life-shattering event that left her abandoned. She works side-by-side with her grandmother, reading tarot, interpreting dreams and providing spiritual rituals. Against her grandmother’s warnings, she refuses to forgive the woman who abandoned their family’s Hoodoo legacy- her mother, believing she’s the reason for her pain. Now, Chade prefers financial security over vulnerability, and friendships and family over romantic forever’s.

Until she meets Emory, a soulful painter with a complicated past, who’s returned to North Carolina to rebuild his life and honor a promise he made to his late mother. But coming home means facing the ghosts he left behind. Some real, some metaphorical. He’s questioning everything he thought he knew about purpose; masculinity and what it means to protect someone without losing himself.

As the two cross paths, the mundane and the mystical begins to blur.

Guilt has a scent and regret leaves footprints that hide behind doors. Bound by a paranormal force and the buried things no one talks about, Chade and Emory are thrust into a supernatural reckoning where healing comes at a cost… and ignoring the past might just ruin everything they’ve worked hard to build.

This is a southern gothic novel about the unseen forces that shape and guide us. The choices that bind or free us, and the courage it takes to face what happens when who you’ve been is no longer enough for who you’re becoming.