The One Unspoken is the first installment of The One Unspoken

Sidonie Verdier and Gabriel Saint-Martin are neighbors who live worlds apart. Born in western Louisiana in 1841, Sidonie is the last and only surviving child of an impoverished white Creole cotton planter, who has abandoned his pregnant wife. When her mother dies in childbirth, Sidonie is left to the care of Adelis, a midwife and former slave who has blackmailed her freedom from her mistress on her deathbed. The two develop an unlikely bond, which is cemented when Adelis realizes that they share a gift—the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. As she grows older, Sidonie also discovers that she has a singular talent for music, passed down from her mysterious and beautiful mother, Isobel Ballantyne. But when Sidonie’s father returns with plans to reclaim the plantation, forge his daughter into a proper Creole lady, and sell her into marriage to the highest bidder, Adelis and Sidonie’s fragile peace is shattered. 

Meanwhile, on a neighboring plantation, Gabriel St. Martin is leading the privileged yet fraught life of a free black sugar-planter’s only son. He chafes under the expectation that he will inherit the plantation, dreaming instead of a career in medicine far beyond the confines of his remote, rural home. When Gabriel is sent to fetch Adelis for the birth of his mother’s seventh child, his orbit collides with Sidonie’s, leading to passionate, forbidden love and a tragedy that will destroy his family, revealing the tangled bloodlines that bind them all. 

From the backwoods bayous of Louisiana to the corrupt, glittering decadence of antebellum New Orleans, THE ONE UNSPOKEN peels back the barbed layers of the Code Noir, which governed both free and enslaved African-Americans. It conjures a shimmering world of voodoo curses, extravagant affairs, and skeletons in family closets, and will appeal to readers of The Movement of Stars by Amy Brill and The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley.