Tess is an engineer. A good swimmer. A young woman with a life in California, sunshine and Silicon Valley. When she’s asked to return to her home island of Stenland, a “small rock between Scotland and the Arctic,” for her childhood best friend Linnea’s wedding, she assumes it will be no more than a blip in her schedule. A couple of days of PTO.
But as A Curse for the Homesick unspools, it’s obvious Tess has unresolved history with Stenland. Years ago, she left behind her great love, Soren, among the Stennish caves and sheep pastures. Soren, with whom she’d felt the most like herself, to whom she’d devoted her most formative years. Soren, who before everything else, was a reminder of why she needed to leave. In a swish of magic reminiscent of Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, the island of Stenland is cursed. Every so often, and without warning, a few Stennish women are marked with three black lines across their foreheads, becoming “skelds.” For the month the lines remain, anyone who makes eye contact with a skeld will turn to stone. Soren and Tess have been inextricably bound since their elementary school days, when Tess’ mother turned Soren’s parents to stone during her skeld season. Growing up in the dark shadow of the curse, of how it killed, Tess was adamant to never be a skeld, to never stay. When she fell for Soren, who loves Stenland, she knew it was star-crossed.
But once she’s back on the island for Linnea’s wedding, Tess and Soren meet again. A Curse for the Homesick is above all a second-chance romance, and author Laura Brooke Robson does a phenomenal job mixing flashbacks with scenes in the present, following Tess’ journey from a young girl into adulthood. We see her with Soren, but also with her dear friends Linnea and Kitty. We watch her navigate what it means to grow up, to grow into or out of a place, to choose between escaping and accepting a complicated past. Robson writes with simple elegance, and her book is not only a devoted character study, it is a love letter to her gorgeous fictional setting of Stenland: the wind, the cairns, the old towers; the ice cream spot and Hedda’s, the only coffee shop; the concrete swimming pool and the claustrophobia of a small town. This grounded, moving novel is a perfect rainy day read and an ode to what it is to be human—to desire and gain, to desire and lose, to find again.
