Bless Your Heart: A Love Letter to Librarians
On big-hearted characters and blood-soaked Southern charm.
With the release of the second book in the Bless Your Heart series, ANOTHER FINE MESS, just shy of three months away, my heart is back at home with the Evans women and their small Southeast Texas town. There’s lots more ahead for Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna (and Belle!), but with their next adventure on the horizon, my thoughts return to not only the women who inspired the Evans women themselves (nor my very Evans-y Texan hometown!), but to the many, many teachers, librarians, and booksellers (and authors) who helped me fall in love with books to begin with.
Though it was written in 2023, months before Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna (and Belle!) met readers worldwide, the letter below is a love letter to all those who inspired me to read the books I love(d) to read—and then, to write more of them! In addition to librarians, teachers, and booksellers, this trove of inspiration now also includes the many incredible readers I’ve met over the past year. I’m so very honored and grateful to have so many wonderful bookish people who’ve joined the Evans family, and want to take a moment to share this letter again as we prepare, quite literally, for ANOTHER FINE MESS!
The following is an excerpt from my Minotaur Debut Week “Letter to Librarians,” which originally ran on September 13, 2023 here.
I know we deal in words but allow me to paint you a picture.
It’s summer 1999, August in rural Southeast Texas. It’s hot out—so damn hot that you begin to melt every time you step into the sun—that you barely notice what’s going on in the world outside of your small town. In these dog days of summer, your makeup smears, your hairspray runs, your leather driver’s seat cushion is enough to scald the backs of your bare legs—but it’s not the heat you’re concerned about.
It’s the roses.
Your late husband, the man you loved so much that you still grieve his early death every single day, he planted a white rosebush in the edge gardens of your family business, and under it you buried your biggest, darkest, most fateful family secret. You’ve kept this secret, this rosebush, for fifteen years. Always feeding, always festering, always worrying about the day that proverbial—or maybe literal—skeleton claws its way out from the dirt.
Then one day a dead woman rises in your family’s funeral parlor, and you know exactly why the roses on your dead husband’s bush have begun to rot—and it’s got nothing to do with the heat.
It’s got everything to do with you and that long-buried secret.
The events of BLESS YOUR HEART are fiction, but the women who bear them—who fight, who survive, who endure—are not. The Evans women are my family. They are me. And they exist, in many ways, because of librarians.
Much like Luna Evans, I was a loner in high school. Before high school, too, and after. I grew up in the shadows and secrets of the women who came before me, and when things got to be too much, too hot, at home, I sought sanctuary in the bookshelves of my local library. It was a librarian who first introduced me to Betty MacDonald and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and later to R. L. Stine and Goosebumps. It was a librarian to whom I showed my flea-market copy of Interview with the Vampire, and who guided me to the horror section—to women like Anne Rice and Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson and Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris.
It was librarians who taught me that little girls can love horror. Can read horror. Can write horror.
Can heal from horror.
It was a librarian who, after the deaths of my great-grandmother and grandmother, during the throes of some of the worst years of my mother’s ongoing chronic illness, encouraged me to take all that pain, all that grief, all that love, and write about it. “Put it on the page,” she said. Pour it out and give it back, she meant. Because when you do that, it never really ends, does it, that story? It gets to live forever in the hearts and hands of readers. Like the restless dead, it becomes immortal. It lives on.
BLESS YOUR HEART began as an exercise—or maybe an exorcism—to say goodbye to the women I loved most. A way to bring them back to life on the page, hear their voices again, and give them different endings. And not just my grandmothers, but my friends, those kids who, like me, were too different to fit into the confines of their small towns. Those beautiful boys and girls who grew up scared to be themselves in small minds. Who, unlike me, never left. Whose stories, like the Evanses’, refuse to stay buried.
Ultimately, despite its horror, its gore, its sometimes tongue-in-cheek and other times biting commentary on growing up in a small Southern town at the turn of the century, BLESS YOUR HEART is a story about the power of motherly love. Of the strength of family, the fallacy of legacy, and the lengths to which women will go to protect one of their own—even if she might be a monster.
Even if she is.
I hope this book does my grandmothers and mother proud. I hope that one day a young woman will walk into a library, and, “Bless her heart,” a librarian will say, “I know just what she needs.” And whether it’s my book or one of innumerable others, that librarian will have one the right one in hand. Because it’s not just books, not just words on paper that librarians give to a young reader, or a mourning writer. It’s hope—and what is a more beautiful gift than a ray of hope bright enough to cut through the dark?
Bless your heart.
BLESS YOUR HEART is now out in hardcover and audio from Minotaur Books (and, in the UK, in paperback, from Solaris Books). The US paperback arrives on shelves March 18, 2025.
ANOTHER FINE MESS will be released on April 15, 2025 (US, Minotaur, hardcover/audio) and on July 17, 2025 (UK, Solaris, paperback).