Stacked Deck

As legend has it, a vengeful witch once placed a spell on all McQuinn women. Their fate? Generations of terrific misfortune. Each of the Love men, on the other hand, suffers a fatal heart attack before his forty-eighth birthday. It’s no surprise then that the young people in the latest accursed generation of the McQuinn-Love clan have little hope for the future. Over a decade since their father’s death at forty-one, the siblings Thom and Kitten are both resigned to their untimely fates. The twenty-eight-year-old man loafs around at home under the watchful eye of their overbearing mother, Queena, while his sister, a few months shy of thirty, has moved back across the country after a failed attempt to escape a maternal string of bad luck. Steeped in the supernatural — restless ghosts, ancestral curses, witchcraft, and the like — Michelle Hébert’s dark family saga, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, proves both engrossing and heart-wrenching.

The novel...