Colleen Mondor Reviews Something Kindred by Ciera Burch

Something Kindred, Ciera Burch (Farrar Straus Giroux 978-0-374-38913-0, $19.99, hc, 284pp) March 2024.

Seventeen-year-old Jericka is 100% not having, at all, the summer she was promised. Stuck in her mother’s hometown of Coldwater, Maryland, Jericka is supposed to be visiting all the beaches in New Jersey with her best friend, figuring out if she and her boyfriend are really as serious as they seem to be and taking pictures for a portfolio she needs to apply to her dream college next year. As Ciera Burch reveals in Something Kindred, family ob­ligations can upend the best-made plans however, and Jericka is caught up in the tide of conflicts that accompany the fraught relationship between her mother and grandmother. Carol Annette is now dying, and everything that was never said about why she left her family has come with Jericka and her mother back to Coldwater to help her through her final weeks. The problem is that this town is haunted and so not exactly a good place to put turbulent emotions to rest.

Jericka and her mother are close – it has almost always been just the two of them – but a lot has been left unsaid, particularly about Jericka’s grand­mother. Arriving in Coldwater to take care of her carries with it some extra drama, as Jericka’s father and his family also live in town. He has been a dis­tant, benign missing piece in her life, but much of why that relationship is the way it is has never been explained. Now, on top of learning what happened between her mother and grandmother, Jericka is about to have a ton of much more personal family history dropped on her head, involving her own past with her father. Burch does an excellent job of showing how insidious family secrets can be and how, in more than one example, the struggle to be the best parent can be a very complicated road. (I want to add that I really loved the depiction of Jericka’s father, who has a unique story to tell.) But remember – Jericka has all those other things from back home, (boyfriend situation, portfolio prep, figuring out exactly who she wants to be), that she brought with her to Coldwater, and while photographing this small town’s history might be something cool to do, there is the very dark episode that left all those ‘‘echoes’’ still wandering about. They have a message for Jericka, and she wants to hear it. But the echoes can be dangerous if you’re not careful, and as her new friend Kat knows all too well, that danger can lead to some long-term terrors.

So, come to Coldwater for a drama with mom and grandma, stay for drama with dad, develop some drama with Kat (some goooooood drama!), deal with some drama from back home, and don’t forget to find yourself before the echoes get too deep in your head. Jericka ends up hav­ing a lot more on her plate this summer than she intended, and Burch so carefully weaves the ghosts into the larger story (and the family issues are most definitely the larger story), that they end up providing clarity far more than chills. There are so many interesting, complicated characters in Something Kindred (even the requisite mean girl), that I didn’t want to leave Coldwater behind. (I especially didn’t want to leave Jericka and Kat!) This is a novel about getting to the bottom of things and embracing the person you find there, no mat­ter how messy she might be. I loved it and look forward to much more from the Ciera Burch, a self-described ‘‘ghost enthusiast’’ who really knows how to write about home.

This review and more like it in the August 2024 issue of Locus.

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