Welcome friend! A Curse for the Homesick by Laura Brooke Robson is a speculative novel set on the cursed island of Stenland, where women live in fear of becoming skelds—beings marked with three black lines who can turn others to stone with a glance. Through Tess’s deeply personal journey, the story explores love, loss, and the difficult ties we form with our homeland. Read on for the synopsis of the book and my review!
On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: one day, any woman on the island can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each window of time lasts only three months, anyone a skeld turns to stone is very much dead.
That’s how Tess’s mother killed Soren’s parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends. She is unwilling to bear the responsibility of one day killing anyone, let alone someone she loves. Soren has been determined to stay, to live out his life in the place he knows as home, even if that life could be cut short during the latest skeld season. They cannot see eye to eye—and yet, they cannot stay apart. She tries to come back for him. He tries to leave for her. But can your love for one person outweigh everything else combined? And how do you decide how much you’re willing to risk, if it might mean destroying someone else in the process?
Laura Robson has crafted a fascinating story about the choices we make, the responsibilities we carry and the ambiguities of regret.
A Curse for the Homesick – Review
A Curse for the Homesick is told from the perspective of Tess. Growing up on Stenland, she is acutely aware of the skeld season when one day, any woman on the island can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld. A skeld turns people to stone. The island nation has its traditions to keep people safe but so many times, inspite of all the efforts, people have died. Tess’s mother walked out of the house one skeld season, not knowing that she was skeld, and turned the parents of Tess’s classmate to stone. Tess loved Soren before that happened but this accident is an important aspect of their relationship.
A Curse for the Homesick beautifully evokes the complex relationship we can have to our home and love against the backdrop of a curse and I want to highlight these aspects in my review through quotes. Laura Brooke Robson masterfully weaves in the way a person makes us feel home and all that can stop us from taking the leap to be with them. She also highlights the struggles of moving abroad and being from a country most people don’t know exist or think is a fantasy. There are many memorable characters in the book but Tess’s childhood girlfriends whose friendships anchor Tess through the years and bring her back home from time to time.
As a child, Tess desperately wants to leave Stenland. Her mother’s actions haunt her. She hates that the curse exists and that it wrecks womens’ lives. She feels the weight of her mother’s careless actions but also she feels deeply for all the girls and women who have and will make mistakes.
“It’s what this island did to them,” she said. “It’s what this island did to me—and to every woman who’s come before us and everyone who’s been turned to stone. You think I’m the only one who’s forgotten to look in the mirror before walking out the door?”
Pg 69
But when she and Soren get together, she finds herself. Their love is one she yearns for and feels safe in but she cannot reconcile that with her efforts to leave this place where she can lose him. This haunting awareness is expressed in the following passage…
(Soren) He had not spent every morning of his life staring at his own reflection, wondering at every smudge and shadow and spot. He had not been trained to examine his face for a monstrosity that felt like a promise. When wind whispered through the tower as we slept, some fickle god of the island looking for girls to ruin, it did not go looking for him.
From the time we were born, we knew the rules. Spend the night with someone if you must, but wake up alone. Always wake up alone. Look at your reflection before you let anyone else see you because if you don’t, the first person to gaze into your eyes may pay a price that can’t ever be repaid.
Pg 117
Tess lives in constant fear of losing Soren, of becoming the very danger she tries to escape. He would not leave Stenland and she cannot stay to be selected for one skeld season and lose him. The only way to avoid that, in her mind, is to leave and make home somewhere else. Something that Tess forgets in her justification to save him through her actions is that there are always three skeld and even if she does not turn him to stone, someone else might through their actions.
I could not explain the duration of my love or the depths of my fear; maybe the words only existed in a language we had lost.
Pg 340
I moved from India to Canada when I was 20 years old. In the decade since, I have had many opportunities to think about home. What India means to me. How hard it is to return to it when I have made another place my home. How complicated it can be to have two homes and leave behind my everyday life to return to an old one. For these reasons, I found myself deeply connecting to Tess’s journey. After leaving Stenland for university, Tess returns home a few times. Returning home to Stenland often triggers reflections on the life she is leading and how authentic it is. The author captures the emotional weight of having more than one home, and how returning to the old one often feels both comforting and disorienting.
I had anticipated, of course, all the ways coming home would be hard, but I forgot to account for all the ways it would be easy: the voices like mine and the music I’d always known; the inside jokes, the familiar stories. In San Francisco, I was forever moving at the not-quite-right speed. It was easy to start believing that people did not find me clever or interesting. But with these people, in this place, I slipped back into a self that fit naturally, some past Tess who did not need to work to make people listen, laugh, understand.
Pg 313
Tess tries to make a life elsewhere. She dates people like August and Noah, but her love for Soren is singular. She sees how easy it is to lose herself trying to fit into a version of someone else’s dream.
I had always been afraid of being trapped, but I had pictured being trapped in a place: a small island, a small home, a small life. […] there were more ways of being trapped. By someone else’s power, money, family. Inside someone else’s version of reality, as a supporting character in the story they wanted to tell.
Pg 206
In trying to avoid the stagnation of Stenland, Tess fears she may have found another version of it elsewhere.
When I had dreaded staying in Stenland, I had dreaded not just the curse but the threat of stagnation: being trapped in a sameness, caught in deep ruts I never saw until I was too far gone to climb out again. I’d been so determined to avoid stagnation in Stenland that maybe I’d tossed myself headlong into it elsewhere.
Pg 304
A Curse for the Homesick is as much about a place being home as a person can feel like home and I loved this aspect of the story. Tess and Soren are meant for each other, but the curse—and her fear of it—create a seemingly insurmountable barrier. They drift apart, yet never quite move on. Seeing him again is inevitable when she returns.
When you stop seeing someone you were in love with, you start to pretend they weren’t as attractive as you thought or that you didn’t love them as much as you thought you did. But sometimes when you see them again, you realize you were wrong. Sometimes you realize you actually did love them. Your body and your brain are in opposite teams; they don’t understand that this person is not yours anymore. It’s agony; it’s euphoria.
Pg 20
I loved A Curse for the Homesick for its poignant story, particularly the tension between leaving and staying, about how love can bind us to people and places even when we desperately want to run. Laura Brooke Robson’s story is steeped in mythology and magic, but what resonated most with me are the human truths: the heartbreak of impossible choices, the weight of our origins, and the quiet hope of finding ourselves again. I will never forget it.
Another unique love story to check out is The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak.
Many thanks to the publisher for a digital review copy of this book for an honest review! All quotes have been verified with the finished book.
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