SHE WHO BURNS

In parallel narratives spanning a century, a woman and her great-grandmother grapple with generational trauma through their interpretations of a tarot deck.

The narrative begins with a traumatic scene of sexual assault. The survivor is Wanda Justice, a 17-year-old girl raised by her single mother in small-town Alberta, Canada. She burns down the abandoned church where the rape took place, enacting the novel’s title for the first of many times. Cut to 1916 in Scotland, where another sexual assault occurs, this time of Sheena Firth. As a result of the assault, Sheena becomes pregnant with Sadie, Wanda’s great-grandmother. Jumping forward to 1999, Wanda struggles with the aftermath of her own assault. The novel also charts Sadie’s travels as she makes her way from the farm where her mother was raised in Scotland to her present-day home in Canada. Both Wanda and Sadie are comforted by the introduction of tarot into their lives. Using their intuitive powers, they’re able to self-reflect on their decisions and prepare for coming difficulties. For example, the cards alert each of them to future problems with the men in their lives. The novel is entrenched in tarot lore; the 22 chapters correspond to the cards of the major arcana, the named cards in a standard tarot deck (the Empress, the Fool, etc.). Representing the trauma and resilience passed down from Sheena to each of her descendants, the women pass a tarot deck from mother to daughter. Coulter provides each character with a distinct voice, preventing confusion despite shifting chronology. Although the linking of Sheena’s trauma to that of her descendants is occasionally heavy-handed, as when Sadie says that Sheena’s “trauma belongs to all of us,” still the theme of women empowering women makes for a timely, poignant novel with shades of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) and Miriam Toews’ Women Talking (2018).

Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.