Suri Daniels, a beautiful and troubled woman, is the descendant of a family of supernaturally gifted women, known as the Blessed, and literally holds keys to gateways between the earthly plane and seven powerful gods. A series of tragic losses and a stipulation in her grandmother’s will has her returning to the family’s home in New Orleans, unaware that she will need to step into the role of Orisha priestess and escape the attention of a powerful demon. To top it all off, she must accept the help of a Cambion—Lyla Jefferies, a dark supernatural being she has spent her life avoiding. What’s worse? She can’t help being drawn to Layla in ways she doesn’t understand.
Being the child of a top-tier demon and a human isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For the past two hundred years, Layla Jefferies has lived a life of quietude. When an unknown force draws her out of seclusion, the pull is too strong to ignore. Layla is tasked to assist with protecting the gateways and saving Suri from becoming a vengeful demon’s avatar. Falling in love with her is definitely not part of the plan.
Layla and Suri are brought together by fate to defeat the darkness threatening to tear their world apart. What they don’t expect to discover is a love that might set them free.
Content advisory: Opening chapter includes a depiction of sexual violence and rape.
Dear Reader,
I wrote The Blessed to honor the resilience, strength, and faith of my community’s ancestors. To tell a story, in my own way, of their survival in a world that treated them as less than the lowest of creatures. A world that continues to methodically strip away our sense of selves as humans and our culture as a people. Layla is the embodiment of all People of Color, particularly Women of Color, in this country and the suffering they have endured, which was violent, painful, and has lasted for generations. I choose to honor all those women like Layla, her mother, and grandmother who survived and rather than turn to violence themselves, chose to stand tall and lift their community up.
The Blessed begins with an act of physical violence to represent how some People of Color were brought into the world. Just as we survived our violent past, so does Layla. Just as we did not allow what was wrought upon us to break us, to take away our capacity to love and cherish others the way we were not, Layla also does not let her circumstances break her. She turns that violence into the resolve to help her community. In the process, she finds a love that strengthens her even more.
You may feel discomfort when reading Layla’s beginnings as it mirrors the pain of the past. Atrocity and its generational impacts should not feel comfortable or easy. But her story is ultimately an uplifting one of family, faith, culture, and love that I believe you will enjoy. I hope you see The Blessed as honoring the struggles of my ancestors and accepting the blessing of life, faith, and love that they have bestowed upon me as a result of their survival.
Forever thankful, always grateful, abundantly blessed,
Anne Shade
