The Bitterwine Oath by Hannah West (review)

The small town of San Solano, Texas, has a tragic history: twelve men were murdered nearly one hundred years ago, supposedly by vengeful, abused young girls, and twelve more men were killed fifty years later, supposedly by cultists obsessed with the first massacre. Nat is right in the middle of that history as the descendent of Malachi Rivers, one of the original girls, and though she’d much rather spend her summer before college making out with her new guy Levi, it turns out there’s no escaping her family lineage. She’s approached by the Wardens, the town’s secret society of women who claim to protect it from the darker forces that truly brought about those earlier deaths and who apparently need Nat’s help to prevent the next “claiming” that will kill another twelve men—including Levi. The pace is frustratingly uneven here, interrupted with Levi’s love poems and a romance that never quite gains poignance (even when Levi’s life his threatened), and the time devoted to Nat’s angst over their relationship might have been better spent further building up the history of the town and the various women that have played their parts as Wardens. Still, the horror hits hard, and there’s nothing like a gunfight against rotting animal corpses inhabited by evil spirits to shake up a story. Fans of the vigilante justice in Oakes’ The Black Coats (BCCB 1/19) looking for a supernatural angle will find it here.