Breakaway Books

Authored by Shawntelle Madison; Published September 2024; Fantasy / Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

The Fallen Fruit was not exactly what I expected it to be. I am easily drawn in by the talk of curses and time travel, but this novel wasn’t that type of fantasy, really. It’s about the dangers of reliving the past, over and over again, especially for Black Americans.

As a commentary, it was cleverly constructed. Throughout the book, we follow several members of the Bridge family spread across time as they grow to understand more and more about the curse that has been passed down through their generations: One person from each generation of every family unit will fall back in time. They clutch freedom papers far longer than the people around them, terrified of being sent back into slavery. But mostly, they mourn the “fallen” and the future that each victim loses.

I closed this book dying to know more, wanting a resolution to this tormenting curse. Why was the Bridge family cursed in this way? Would they be effectively stuck in a form of a time loop forever? Is there any way they could have broken loose? The answer to this last, at least, seems to be no. The Bridges themselves do not have the power to set themselves free. But this novel was much more about the powerlessness the Bridge family faced in the form of a supernatural force that they could neither control nor understand.

I found myself thinking a lot about this novel after I closed it. In spite of the sometimes clumsy word choice, and the lack of satisfaction I had finishing it—all those lingering questions!—I thought a lot about the story’s deeper significance. In some ways, it was a hyper-local history, stories of a family orchard passed down from the 1700s through the 1960s. But it holds universal truths about racism and how desperately hopeless it can feel to fight toward progress against it.

The Fallen Fruit is not a fantasy beach read to choose to escape to another world, but it will make you think more deeply about this one.