Cursed Daughters is a dark, witty, Lagos-set family saga about Monife, Ebun, and Eniiyi—three women bound by a supposed love-curse and a reincarnation rumor—who must decide whether to repeat the script or rewrite it. Early trade coverage confirms the premise and scope, from the UK/US cover reveals and publication rollout to interviews about the book’s shift away from the author’s debut’s tone.
The Falodun women believe they are jinxed in love—and Braithwaite’s newest novel shows how a story about a “curse” becomes a survival script many daughters inherit and must unlearn.
At heart, Cursed Daughters tackles an everyday problem with unusual bite: how intergenerational beliefs and private tragedies can calcify into “rules” that limit women’s lives, dating choices, and self-worth. So if you’ve ever felt trapped by a family story, this one feels painfully familiar, sometimes funny, and frequently devastating.
Reviewers describe a multi-generation plot spanning from the late 1990s to the present and focused on Monife’s drowning, Ebun’s pragmatism, and Eniiyi’s eerie resemblance to her dead aunt (plus whispers of atunwá, reincarnation).
Best for readers who love intergenerational drama, magical-realist shivers, Lagos texture, and sharp social comedy; not for readers who need tidy mysteries, nonstop plot, or zero domestic tension.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic Books UK, Sept 25, 2025; US release announced for Nov 2025) is the author’s second novel after My Sister, the Serial Killer, arriving with strong pre-publication buzz and immediate media interest.
The background matters because Cursed Daughters reframes a “curse” as social inheritance rather than jump-scare horror, a move critics have highlighted since its UK publication in September 2025. Review essays sketch a timeline (1994–present), centering Monife’s death by drowning, Ebun’s resistance to superstition, and Eniiyi’s burden of resemblance that fuels the reincarnation rumor.
Reviewers in The Guardian and the FT emphasize the way grief, patriarchy, and superstition braid into everyday choices—dating, careers, mother-daughter talk, and what gets called love.
Meanwhile, the author has been candid that she wanted to move “far away” from the tone of her bestselling debut while keeping her fascination with female relationships and dark humor.
All of this primes the reader to watch belief itself—devotion, delusion, and duty—behave like a character.
Cursed Daughters shows how to spot—and stop—self-limiting narratives masquerading as family wisdom.
Stories we inherit can become prisons, and escaping them requires new stories we dare to live. We see this in Eniiyi’s everyday life: a stare becomes a verdict; a room becomes a shrine; a name becomes a destiny—“Monife?” an elder insists, and suddenly the living girl disappears under the dead cousin’s name. “Eniiyi no longer existed for her,” Braithwaite writes, in one of the novel’s most chilling domestic moments.
Repeated, concrete scenes of misrecognition and control dramatize the “curse”—a grandmother who cannot see Eniiyi, only Monife; a hallway confrontation that bans swimming; a locked bedroom preserved as if its occupant “was coming back soon.” Each is on-the-page, physically staged, and ethically complicated.
Cursed Daughters is best for readers who relish braided timelines, Nigerian domestic realism laced with superstition, and thorny mother-daughter love; not for those seeking crime-thriller pacing or a tidy supernatural “explanation.”
2. Background
Braithwaite’s second novel arrives after her breakout 2018 debut; in interviews, she describes deliberately pivoting away from murder to grief and belief while keeping a razor-edged voice. The historical substrate here is personal rather than national: a family legend about romantic ruin—“No man will call your house his home…”—is treated as received history that polices daughters’ choices.
Within the Falodun home, the “West” and “East” wings echo competing matriarchal energies, a physicalization of lineage that critics have tied to generational trauma rather than literal hexes. T
he British and American jacket copy and early reviews repeatedly frame the novel as “wickedly funny” yet “haunting,” a tonal blend that lets superstition read as both coping strategy and cage.
And like classic magical realism, the uncanny is held at room temperature: people behave as if the strange is normal, which is precisely how cultures turn stories into laws.
3. Cursed Daughters Summary
Part 1: The House of Women and the Ghost of a Girl
The novel opens in a Lagos household ruled by memory and myth: a multigenerational compound in which three women—Grandma East, Grandma West, and their niece Kemi—raised two girls, Monife (“Mo”) and her quieter cousin Ebun.
Years later, Ebun is a single mother raising her daughter, Eniiyi, in the same house, and the space itself feels haunted—not by rattling chains but by an absence: Monife, the dazzling cousin who died young at the turn of the millennium. Everyone talks around Mo’s death; no one talks about it.
The silence hardens into a family curse-story—part omen, part operating system—that insists Falodun women are “cursed” in love and will destroy the men they love (a legend traced in a mid-book interlude about Yemisin Falodun’s broken engagement and her fiancé’s ominous spiritual warning) .
That curse gives Cursed Daughters its centrifugal force and its title: the Falodun women are “cursed daughters,” heirs to a story that tells them how their bodies, choices, and futures must be interpreted.
The narrative toggles between three timelines: (1) Mo in the 1990s through 2000, (2) Ebun in the 2000s/2010s, and (3) Eniiyi in 2023–24. Braithwaite uses the shifts to show how a family myth mutates from superstition to self-fulfilling prophecy—and how a daughter can grow up inside a story about someone else’s life and feel it colonize her own.
Mo’s timeline begins as the chronicle of an incandescent young woman—funny, impulsive, romantic—who falls for Kalu, nicknamed “Golden Boy.”
He’s well-heeled, dutiful to his mother, and the kind of Nigerian son whose future is a stitched-together web of family obligation and class expectation. Mo believes she and Kalu are inevitable; Kalu’s family, led by the formidable Mrs. K, has other plans.
The pressure intensifies after Mrs. K maneuvers a genteel “chance” lunch and begins to micromanage Kalu’s path, even organizing a meeting with Ada, the acceptable choice. When Mo asks Kalu point-blank about Ada, he tries to minimize—“We laughed about meddling mums”—but his evasions seed dread in Mo’s mind .
From there, Mo starts thrashing against the curse. She consults Mama G, a spiritual fixer, stockpiling little rituals and objects—powders, charms, and, tellingly, Kalu’s handkerchief, which she buries at the white mahogany tree as a talisman to bind him to her: “It’s an antidote against the curse,” she tells skeptical Ebun while troweling dirt over the folded cloth .
The irony is sharp—Mo insists she’s not the kind of woman who does “such things,” even as desperation makes her that very person . Love, for her, is both sanctuary and quicksand.
A dinner with Kalu’s mother exposes how class and respectability politics will always outrank Mo’s feelings. Not long after, the worst happens in the most ordinary way: Mo meets Kalu at a supermarket and sees the ring—a gold band that looks wrong on his finger, but right in his mother’s plan—and realizes she’s been displaced.
Braithwaite writes the scene with acute physical detail (the pink shirt, the cream trousers, the bandana over Mo’s hair) so the heartbreak lands in sensory memory, not just plot summary .
Then comes the spiral. Mo discovers she’s pregnant. Mrs. K barges into the Falodun house and calls Mo a homewrecker, pressuring her to “Get rid of it” with a discreet doctor; even Kemi, for a pained moment, urges the practical difficulty of single motherhood. Mo refuses, repeating “No” like a mantra; it’s one of the fiercest scenes in Cursed Daughters, and Ebun finally cries out—“Enough!”—and kicks Kalu’s emissaries out of the house .
In private, Mo and Ebun talk through the unthinkable; Ebun proposes a back-alley abortion she’s heard about. They go together at 10pm to a drab office through a back door, are handed pills and instructions, and walk out changed—though in different ways than they expect .
Mo takes the pill and miscarriages in a bathroom, the scene rendered with brutal concision: a sound hitting the water, a wave of pain, and then a blankness where a future used to be .
The cousins retreat to separate rooms of grief. Weeks later, Mo notices Ebun is still pregnant—Ebun, it turns out, could not go through with it—and Mo erupts with a scream that seems to split the house: the two girls made a choice together; only one of them had to live with its consequences . The scream echoes forward through decades; it is the hinge on which the book swings.
The shock calcifies into resolve. Mo, already frayed by Kalu, by the curse, and by the loss, decides that if love is a story that will always be weaponized against her, the only control she has left is how her story ends.
She hails an okada to the bridge, pays more than the fare in a final gesture of human kindness, removes her shoes, and stares down at the black water. She writes that she’ll “see them all in another life,” and then she steps forward; “The water beckoned” . On April 9, 2000, at Elegushi beach, Monife drowns herself; it is not an accident—a detail the family hides from Eniiyi for twenty-three years, feeding the fog that will later swallow the girl’s sense of self .
Part 2 “The Girl Who Lived and the Story She Refuses
Ebun’s timeline begins with survival: she becomes a devoted mother to Eniiyi, even as fear and superstition harden around her like armor. The grandmothers, who adored Mo and treated her as a family sun, project that brightness onto the baby and then police it: don’t let the curse find her, don’t let the past repeat.
Ebun tries to parent against both her elders’ fatalism and her own grief. When a medical scare lands young Eniiyi in the hospital and she needs an EpiPen, Ebun realizes how much she’s let the fear run the home—and silently vows to give her daughter freedom from superstition .
The vow turns into action years later, when a teenage Eniiyi walks into the living room with three brochures and says, “I want to go to boarding school.”
Ebun, stunned but perceptive, recognizes the wisdom in it: the house they share with Mo’s ghost is unhealthy; “What better way to blossom outside of Monife’s shadow than to get far away from the home she shared with her dead aunt”.
The grandmothers protest—boarding school is dangerous, the food is horrible, “they rape people”—but Ebun holds firm. When the school requires all girls to cut their hair short, Eniiyi submits eagerly, as if she’s been waiting to shed an identity the house keeps pasting onto her: “As her daughter’s gorgeous hair fell to the ground, so did Ebun’s tears” .
Eniiyi’s timeline in 2023–24 is where Cursed Daughters comes to rest—and to reckoning.
She returns to Lagos after university with a restless energy and a spectral problem: she dreams Mo’s dreams, feels Mo’s moods, and sometimes moves through the world as if Mo’s past were a script she can’t stop reading.
One day at Elegushi beach, she saves a drowning stranger, surfacing through the drag of the current; the scene mirrors Mo’s death, but with an opposite ending: “She rose to the surface, kicking frantically and drew in air… she was in no danger of drowning”.
The beach gives her a temporary nickname—“little mermaid”—and a flicker of fame among friends, including the loyal Funsho and the flashier Kunle. The rescue is also a symbolic line in the sand: whatever the curse says about Falodun women and water, Eniiyi’s body refuses to comply.
At home, the family is fraying. Grandma West is sliding into dementia—the memory-queen who could recite conversations near verbatim now struggles to recognize the present, sometimes even calling Eniiyi “Monife.” The role-confusion devastates the girl; it’s one thing to be compared to a dead aunt, quite another to be misidentified as her, to be spoken to as if you are someone else’s past resurrected.
Not long after, the family buries Grandma East and soon after lays Grandma West to rest as well; Eniiyi gives a public tribute, private grief lapping at her ankles, and then receives an email from her cosmopolitan aunt Ashley with a link to a UK genetics lab internship—a route out, a new story to live inside .
Meanwhile, Zubby, the rescued man’s friend (and soon her boyfriend), becomes a proving ground. He’s kind and intent, but their romance is shadowed by the house’s comparative theater: Zubby vs. Golden Boy, Eni vs. Mo. When Zubby pleads, “I’m not Golden Boy. I am me. And you are you,” he’s raging against fate on both their behalves—and part of Eni wants to believe him.
But the family secret detonates first. Over a meal, Uncle Tolu calmly tells Eniiyi the truth: “Monife drowned. But it wasn’t an accident. She took herself there, and she walked into the water.” Eni’s face twitches as twenty-three years of misinformation collapse; she finally understands why the house taught her to fear water and to treat love as a sacrificial rite .
The revelations keep coming. Eni learns that, back then, Mrs. K once trespassed into their living room with her moral sledgehammer, that Mo and Ebun went for abortion pills together at night, that Ebun didn’t take hers; she also learns about Asuquo, the man Ebun has quietly loved for years and who now proposes marriage after learning Eni’s paternity truth—only for Ebun to decline, sobbing that she doesn’t deserve happiness because of “what I did to Mo.”
When Eni scoffs, Ebun confesses and Eni answers with a line that bridges the book’s metaphysics and its psychology: “Really mum? I’m her; aren’t I?” .
That line turns the plot into ritual. That night, Eni walks to the white mahogany tree and digs up the love-charms Mo once buried—handkerchiefs, trinkets, bits of spellwork—and returns them to Kalu, telling him cleanly: “Your story has ended Mr. Kenosi. Don’t worry about ours.” It’s an exorcism by logistics, a curse-breaking by errands; the magic dissolves under the light of ordinary action .
Finally, she cuts her hair (again shedding identity), accepts the UK internship, and begins to pack.
At the doorway, Asuquo, Grandma, and Ebun linger with awkward hugs; Ebun apologizes: “I am sorry things turned out the way they did… And I hope this next chapter of your life is everything you want it to be.” The line is both benediction and relinquishment; for once, a Falodun mother names the daughter’s future as her own .
The ending unfolds in a double image. Underground, in myth-space, a mermaid-figure wrestles the curse “like a beast” in the deep and finally breaks it to pieces. Above ground, in real life, Eni walks down the plane’s aisle to seat 32C and “soars” toward a self-authored future.
Cursed Daughters’ last grace note says that if she had looked down from the sky, she might have seen “a familiar shadow on the water’s surface”—and that the sight would confirm what the family has always denied: this body and its freedom belong to Eniiyi .
Quick Timeline
- 1995–2000 (Monife): Mo falls for Kalu, resists Mrs. K, toys with Mama G’s rituals, becomes pregnant, rejects pressure to abort, takes abortion pills with Ebun but miscarries; discovers Ebun kept her pregnancy; devastated, she walks to Elegushi and dies by suicide on April 9, 2000—“she walked into the water” .
- 2006–2012 (Ebun): Single mother to Eniiyi; battles the house’s superstition; a hospital scare jolts her into promising freedom from fear; she lets Eni go to boarding school and even cuts her glorious hair herself, weeping as curls fall .
- 2023–24 (Eniiyi): Saves a drowning man at Elegushi; deals with Grandma West’s dementia; dates Zubby; learns truth from Uncle Tolu about Mo’s suicide; hears Ebun’s guilt about the past and Asuquo’s proposal; digs up Mo’s love-charms and returns them to Kalu; cuts hair; accepts a UK genetics internship; boards a flight—parallel to a mythic image of a mermaid strangling the curse at the bottom of the sea; Cursed Daughters ends with Eni in 32C, “untethered,” claiming her life .
Ending Explained
The final pages run two reels at once. On the mythic reel, a mermaid-girl (Mo, Eni, or the archetypal Falodun woman) wrestles the curse in the deep and breaks it. On the real-world reel, Eni boards a plane to the UK for a science internship.
The image of a “familiar shadow on the water’s surface” below her implies both ancestral blessing and closure: Mo’s story has been witnessed—and left in the past—while Eni’s story ascends. Braithwaite’s point is not that curses are “fake,” nor that rituals “work,” but that stories—the ones we inherit and the ones we write—decide how we live in our bodies.
Eni’s final act of returning Kalu’s relics and leaving the country is the mundane heroism that ends a myth: no high priest, no sacrifice, just a woman who refuses to be written by someone else’s tragedy .
Anchoring citations
- The family myth that frames everything: “FALODUN FAMILY CURSE”—and the story of Yemisin’s fiancé who’s warned marriage will kill him—sets the pattern of fear that shapes daughters for decades .
- Mo’s ritual impulse, and the talisman under the tree: “Burying Golden Boy’s handkerchief… It’s an antidote against the curse” (Mo to Ebun) .
- The abortion night: “They were taken through a back door and told to wait outside. A thin woman… provided pills and a set of instructions” .
- Mo’s loss: “She heard the sound of something hitting the water in the toilet bowl… She didn’t have to check, she knew” .
- The betrayal between cousins: “Are you still pregnant?… I could not go through with it… And Mo screamed” .
- The suicide: “She would see them all in another life… The water beckoned” (at the bridge, shoes placed by the rail) .
- The truth bomb decades later: “Monife drowned… She took herself there, and she walked into the water” (Uncle Tolu to Eni) .
- Ebun’s parenting pivot: “God had given her a second chance”—after the hospital EpiPen scare—“Eniiyi emancipated herself… ‘I want to go to boarding school.’” .
- The cutting as shedding: “As her daughter’s gorgeous hair fell to the ground, so did Ebun’s tears” .
- The curse’s end and the self’s beginning: “She was untethered. A mermaid in the deep blue sea… Above her, Eniiyi… found seat 32C… If she had looked down… she would have spotted a familiar shadow” .
4. Cursed Daughters Analysis
I read Cursed Daughters as three overlapping dramas—Monife’s fatal romance, Ebun’s hard pragmatism, and Eniiyi’s battle with misrecognition—and what gripped me most was how often love arrives alongside erasure.
4.1 Cursed Daughters Characters
Eniyiniyi (our present-day focalizer) is the novel’s moral weather vane, and Braithwaite makes her doubt tactile: a grandmother’s “Monife?” un-names her; a boyfriend’s arms briefly re-name her back into herself; a locked room tempts her to seek truth in relics.
The most harrowing beats are small: “Eniiyi no longer existed for her,” as Grandma West, lost to dementia, keeps addressing the living girl as the dead one; later, the same elder bans her from “going near the water,” a foreshadow that blends love, fear, and superstition.
Ebun, meanwhile, is the novel’s conscience and its enforcer—protective to the point of violence when she believes atunwá talk will swallow her child’s identity.
Monife, the lost cousin whose drowning haunts everything, is reconstructed through memories, dreams, and preserved spaces—“Monife could have left the room a mere five minutes ago,” the text observes, in a line that collapses time and grief.
That room functions like a reliquary and a trap, fueling Eniiyi’s need to “know who I was before” even as it deepens family denial. These women aren’t archetypes; they are mutually misreading one another under pressure, which is the novel’s tragic engine.
4.2 Cursed Daughters Themes & Symbolism
The “curse” is the central symbol—sometimes spoken like a proverb, sometimes enforced like policy—and Cursed Daughters’s best scenes show how belief crowds out consent. Lagos water is a recurring image: sea dreams, swimming lessons, bans on leaving the house, and the preserved fear around Monife’s drowning; water becomes desire, danger, and memory all at once.
The locked West-wing bedroom, meticulously kept for a daughter who “had not been laid to rest,” literalizes unresolved grief as domestic architecture. Even humor is symbolic—those prickly auntie quips and Nollywood-adjacent asides—because playfulness is how the Falodun women keep breathing inside their rules.
5. Evaluation
Strengths. The dialogue snaps, the domestic spaces hum with history, and small set-pieces (“Tell her she will not go!”; a grandmother mistaking a living girl for the dead; a mother physically stopping herself mid-rage) land like aftershocks.
The romantic subplot (Zubby) is tender and complicated, and the late-book family-meeting arc smartly repositions the elders’ “protection” as harm cloaked in love. The result is a page-turner that breathes—funny, spooky, and emotionally lucid.
Weaknesses. A few middle chapters meander (critics fairly note some repetition and “over-symbolism”), and the reincarnation motif will frustrate readers craving either a rational debunking or a full paranormal reveal. Still, those choices feel intentional: ambiguity is the point because that’s how belief works in families.
Impact. I finished gutted and oddly hopeful, sensing how a mother’s fear can be both a shield and a weapon—and how a daughter’s refusal to be misnamed can become the family’s only real counter-magic.
Comparison. If you liked Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me for its intimate stakes, or the generational pulse of One Hundred Years of Solitude, you’ll recognize the way private myths script public life; Probinism’s essays on magical realism and family sagas map those traditions neatly to what Braithwaite is doing here.
6. Personal Insight & Contemporary Educational Relevance
Reading Cursed Daughters, I kept thinking how easily a “curse” can stand in for what, in classrooms, we’d call intergenerational trauma and social scripting.
In Eniiyi’s world, the Falodun curse explains everything from heartbreak to drowning; in ours, students often inherit quieter scripts—“people like us don’t study that,” “our family doesn’t talk about mental health,” “good daughters don’t move away.”
Cursed Daughters makes those invisible rules visible, and that’s educational gold. Through Monife’s death and Eniiyi’s slow push for her own life, you can open conversations about suicide, reproductive choice, and the pressure of respectability in ways that feel embodied rather than abstract.
For context, teachers could connect this to current data on youth mental health and suicide risk among young women, and pair the book with accessible resources such as WHO’s mental health fact sheets or UNICEF’s reports on adolescents’ wellbeing.
In a literature or social studies classroom, Cursed Daughters also works beautifully for critical thinking about belief systems. You can ask: when does a belief protect, and when does it control?
Students can map every time a character justifies a decision with “curse logic,” then reframe that same moment using the language of psychology, gender expectations, or class. Suddenly, a “haunted” Lagos house becomes a case study in how culture, religion, and patriarchy intertwine.
Most of all, Eniiyi’s final choice—to return Kalu’s relics, cut her hair, and board a plane for a science internship—offers a hopeful model: you don’t have to hate your family to step outside its story. In contemporary education, that may be the most radical lesson of all.
7. Cursed Daughters Quotes
“‘Monife?’ … Eniiyi no longer existed for her.”
“‘You will not go!’ … telling her she was not going to go near the water.”
“Monife could have left the room a mere five minutes ago—it looked as if the inhabitant was coming back soon.”
“I know I am a reincarnation… Grandmother says it is called Atunwa.”
“‘That boy will hurt you.’”
8. Conclusion
This is a fierce, absorbing novel that proves how a “curse” can be nothing more—and nothing less—than the stories a family keeps repeating until someone finally says no.
Readers who love intergenerational fiction, Lagos settings, thorny mother-daughter dynamics, and a shimmer of the uncanny should read this next; crime-thriller purists may prefer Braithwaite’s debut, but Cursed Daughters rewards patience with a deeper, more resonant ache.
And yes—if you’ve ever been misnamed by your own history, this book feels like oxygen.
