Daughters of Jubilation is a powerful read.  Imbued with a beautiful, graceful sense of strength, it comes out swinging with a heroine who has a wonderfully memorable voice.

Sixteen-year-old Evalene – Evvie - Deschamps is growing up in a Jim Crow Era mid-south, helping to care for her younger twin half-sisters, crushing on cool older kid Clay – whom she’s been eyeing forever - and babysitting on the side for a woman she can’t stand when her Jubilation arrives and quite literally shakes up her world.  Her growing psychic powers uproot a tree and brings true her wish for a family of racists to experience an accident.  Evvie saves the life of those racists and ends up being hailed as a hero?? in the local paper.  With that, she realizes her Jubilation has begun – she’s the latest in a long line of generational magic makers, going all the way back through her maternal bloodline.

Evvie is well aware that this family gift is part and parcel of being a Deschamps woman (her mother calls it a curse). It manifests early as blackouts that happen here and there in their youth, and they begin to jube on the regular sometime in their teens. It’s something they rarely talk about outside of their close family circle, and each woman in the Deschamps family has a different opinion about their powers.  Evvie decides to follow along her caustic, magic-loving Grandma Attie’s path – she’s going to practice her gifts instead of avoiding magic and the practice thereof like her own more religious mother.  Evvie is galvanized into action when the man who raped her (this happens before the book opens) begins to stalk her, threatening her sisters with violence. Training under Attie, Evvie must learn how to hex her stalker and protect her loved ones before it’s too late.

The worldbuilding alone is worth the price of admission to Daughters of Jubilation.  Corthron’s approach toward magic – and how it affects each of the women in the Deschamps family for better or worse, is multilayered and a great example of letting characters drive your universe instead of the other way around.

Aside from its exploration of magic, the book combines family feelings, generational conflicts, the swoony feeling of youthful falling in love, and the bigger picture of life in the racist hell that was the segregated south in the early 1960s.  You can feel the heat of the summer sun, the way it wavers up from car hoods, the sound of owls in the trees, and the smell of tomatoes frying.

Evvie is wonderful – complicated, tough, blunt, romantic, warm, bright and impassioned.  She’s funny – the kind of person who calls her period “Ambushina” – and I loved her.  Just as wonderful is her no-nonsense yet loving mother, and wise but tough and acerbic Attie.  Her playful and realistically messy twin sisters are funny and both come off as well-rounded individuals.

Evvie’s more wallflower-like friend Anne Marie - who is suffering from abuse at the hands of her uncle and trying to puzzle out a crush on a fellow female classmate - is the quieter and more subdued half of their friendship.  And then there’s Clay, who has a beautiful, playful and touching romance with Evvie with a complicated and sad conclusion.

There’s not much more I can say about the story without spoiling it, but Daughters of Jubilation is one of those books where you’ll be more than glad you were left to take the ride alone and discover the journey for yourself.

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NOTE: The book includes references to pre-book rape, semi-explicit sexual encounters, depictions of racial violence, physical abuse, graphic (and in several cases richly enjoyable) murder, racism – including usage of the n-word, depictions of stalking and period-typical sexism and a scene where our heroine tries to force her whole period to happen in a single moment and almost passes out from the bleeding.

I’m not in the right headspace for this book and probably won’t be for some time. I didn’t realize this wasn’t set in the present time, but around the old south. With how things are with race and the BLM, I’m not really sure I can finish this one. Reading about a “white people pleasing smile” isn’t something I can stomach right now.

**Review will be posted on my blog on 10/3/20**
**3.5 STARS**

Thank you to Simon Shusters Books for Young Readers and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read this eARC.

Let’s break it down:

My Attention: very intrigued

World Building: Jim Crow, South Carolina while Kennedy is President

Writing Style: it flowed well

Bringing the Heat: 🔥🔥

Crazy in Love: Clay and Evvie are definitely in love

Creativity: I enjoyed learning the magic of Jubilation

Mood: bittersweet

Triggers: rape, sexual assault, physical abuse, violence, racism, n-word, stalking, murder

My Takeaway: Take back your power when someone steals it from you!

I Liked:
*The book takes place in Jim Crow South Carolina so the writer gives it the distinct accents and sayings from that area. You can feel change is in the air with JFK as president, but some are skeptical, and others are hopeful that change may or may not happen.

*I liked the concept of jubilation as being magic that black women have passed down in their families because it was magic for protection. Jubilation was used to counter some of the horrors of slavery that black women experienced and like Clay’s grandmother says, she didn’t realize they would still need to use jubilation today.

*Evalene and Clay’s relationship isn’t insta-love though their sex scene seems quite instant. She crushed on him for a long time and he finally notices her and things go fast. But then as their relationship grows, they take time to date and so it slows down which is nice, because then we get to know both of them well. They are obviously crazy about each other.

*Indigo, Evvie’s mom, gives her the talk about using protection without shying away from the topic. Go mom!
Evalene is an interesting character – she’s at times impulsive and because she’s so new with her power, sometimes can’t control it. But she learns how to do it with help from her eccentric grandmother and she needs it to help battle a demon from her past.

Random Notes:
*I don’t mind cursing in books but if you don’t like cursing, then this book might not be for you because it has a lot of it.

*Evalene has a dark past and it is traumatic. The ending is very sad and bittersweet.

Final Thoughts:
Daughter of Jubilation is a story about battling demons from the past. Jubilation is a gift of magic, born in a time of slavery to help black women deal with the horrors happening in their lives. Now Evalene has inherited this magic to face a stalker that hurt her a long time ago but she can’t do it alone. Evvie uses her jubilation to try and protect the people she loves and to break free from the past.

💕 ~ Yolanda

I've been trying to make it through but I am really not connecting to the characters. It feels like the protagonist is both too mature and too childish at different times, which is kind of what high schoolers are, I guess. It just feels so inauthentic. The dream sequences were odd, as was the recurring "bad guy". Evvie seemed really morally in the gray, which is a hard place for me to understand, but I've never gotten magic powers so maybe I'd be tempted to make people sick or whatever too? I just didn't connect.

Trigger warning: Rape, stalking, murder, racism, sexism

Jubilation can mean many things to many people. To the mother, grandmother and daughters in this book, it is happiness and pain. Evvie is the heroine in this tale. She faces great adversity, finds a true love, and learns the secrets of her ancestors.

This story may upset some because of the subject matter. The dialect is native to the deep South, however the events in the book do happen to many women every day. Protect yourselves. Assault is not your fault. Find your power and harness it. You are a child of God, you are not ugly, you are good.

I’m going to start this review off by saying I would not have requested this title if I’d known it dealt with sexual assault. There was no content warning and with this subject matter that is unforgivable. Anyone who is a survivor of sexual assault or simply just doesn’t want to read about it in fiction should not have it sprung on them while reading.

I finished this book out of obligation but I will not be recommending it to anyone.

There is a rape scene in the eighty-percent mark of the book. Since there was no warning in the book, I’m providing one now.

I gave this book two stars. It’s a fast read so getting through it isn’t difficult. That said, the pacing is too fast. Things happen one after the other in an awkwardly paced domino effect that left me wondering if I’d somehow missed something. The description of the main character using the jubilation, or jubin’ as it’s said by her mother and grandmother, also isn’t distinctly described. It’s just suddenly happening.

There are few descriptions of the actual town she lives in, so few I actually forgot where it happened. I appreciate seeing a way of speaking that I never thought I’d see published--the way my family speaks and other people I’ve known. That was nice.

Unfortunately the characters weren’t very stand out. I know the MC had two guy friends but I couldn’t remember them by the seventy-percent mark of the book. The main character’s voice is very distinct but even she feels a little flat to me.
She paid so little attention to one friend for years that when it turns out she’s not kind to him she’s actually surprised.

I won’t spoil the ending. The main character does change and learns to be a bit more open and understanding. There’s an lgbtq+ character who doesn’t die which is always a positive.

All in all, I will not read this book again, or recommend it. It gets two stars for being decently written in some spots but the pacing is a massive downfall and the flatness of so many characters, the disjointed feeling of so many of the action scenes, it’s too much to give it anything higher.
I really wanted to love this book. It’s the first book I’ve read that I regret reading.