In Kalynn Bayron’s This Poison Heart, Briseis, a 17-year-old rising senior from Brooklyn, inherits a mansion in upstate New York from an aunt she never even knew that she had. When she and her parents move there for the summer, they find acres of overgrown wilderness, hidden rooms crammed with books about plants, a fully stocked apothecary shop, and a whole lot of mysteries. On top of everything, strangers start to appear outside of the house at odd hours, and it becomes clear that the people living in the town know much more than they let on. 

Explaining the mythology connections in this story would give away too many spoilers, but readers can start guessing from the fact that Briseis’s aunt’s name is Circe, her birth mother is named Selene, and the house is full of paintings of Medea and Hecate. On top of that, Briseis has a magical ability with plants that causes them to grow and a natural immunity to any plant-based poison. Plants turn toward her like they would follow the sun, and she has a strong urge to cultivate the most toxic plants in the world. Bayron excels at interweaving Black American culture with Greek mythology, and she never pauses to give unnecessary explanations. After all, Greek mythology is filled with people of West Asian and African descent, so why would she need to justify her Black characters’ connection to the ancient Greek world? 

This book has a lot to recommend it, even without my good word. It has a heroine who’s smart, diverse, and queer. It has two loving, supportive, and often hilarious parents who are there for her when she needs them. I do have some quibbles, and readers will probably share some of them. The ease with which one character reads a manuscript in proto-Greek stings, especially since no known examples of proto-Greek writing survive. The poison plants that Briseis handles are deadly, but none of them are quite as fast acting as Bayron describes them. Also, the book is a bit slow to get started. Once it gets going, though, it’s a race to the finish. The worst thing is that it ends on a massive cliff-hanger. As of writing (February 2022) we still have to wait four months until the sequel, This Wicked Fate, comes out. – Krishni Burns