Cursed Daughters

Before we talk about anything else: was there a superstition in your own family growing up, something you were told not to do in case it brought bad luck?

What was the moment in the early chapters where you felt yourself settle in and trust this book, where you thought, yes, I want to spend an evening here?

The women in this family keep inheriting something they never asked for. What have you quietly inherited from the women in your family, good or heavy, that you only noticed later?

Braithwaite is funny in the middle of sad things. Which bit of humor landed for you, and did laughing make the hard parts easier to sit with or a little more tender?

Where did the book feel most like home to you? Think of the domestic texture: kitchens, aunties arriving uninvited, phone calls, the particular noise of family. What did it remind you of?

The novel leaves room to read the curse as real or as a story a family tells itself. Which reading did you find more comforting, and why do you think you reached for that one?

Somewhere in this book a woman decides she will not simply pass things down the way they were passed to her. Without giving anything away, what did that kind of decision cost in your own family, or what do you wish someone had been brave enough to break?

By the last stretch of the novel, had your feelings toward the mothers in this family softened, hardened, or just gotten more complicated? What in you do you think was doing the shifting?