June 04th, 2025

Thanks to partners NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the digital ARC of Shea Ernshaw’s The Beautiful Maddening, which is available for purchase!

I can always depend on Shea Ernshaw to build an incredibly atmospheric novel—her books are gothic and drenched in foreboding and full of complicated characters.

Ernshaw’s newest book, The Beautiful Maddening, fits right into the stack of Ernshaw’s previous YA novels on my (virtual) shelf. The story of Lark Goode and a family curse and the boy who—maybe—can break it captured my imagination.

Lark and her twin brother live alone in a crumbling house on a creek in the very small town of Cutwater. Every year, when their tulips bloom, the curse that began with their ancestor flares to life, and they become irresistible until the tulips die again.

For Lark’s brother, this yearly ritual seems uncomplicated: he can revel in the attention, get what he can out of the situation, and then move back to his normal, attractive-but-resistible state.

Lark feels differently. She’s desperate to get her high school diploma and then to leave Cutwater, to wrest free from the tulips and the curse that has plagued the love stories of every one of her Goode ancestors. This year, her senior year, the tulips bloom with one week left of school, so Lark steels herself to make it through the laser focus of her classmates so that she can graduate and then escape.

And then two things change. First, some of the other students seem to have fallen under the tulips’ curse: they are just as enticing as Lark. And, second, there’s a new boy at school . . . and he’s not falling for her.

Ernshaw weaves this story patiently, adding layer after layer of family history, town lore, and mystery. While I didn’t always love the tulips, I was captivated by Lark’s attempts to define her own identity, doing her best to resist the fate that everyone—her parents, her brother, her town—insist is inescapable.

---