The Quarter Queen
Kayla Hardy
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN: 978-0593976760
Ballantine, March 2026, 384 pgs

Back in the day, we had movies like Angel Heart and The Serpent and the Rainbow, which were fresh, groundbreaking, and exciting on first view, but, on closer inspection, were seriously questionable in terms of gaze and positioning and framing when it comes to cultural elements. Don’t get me wrong. I loved them. I also hated them if we were to talk about the way they treated some of their characters and cultural ideas. Voodoo was little more than “exotic” horror, and Black culture reduced to being “strange folk with strange ways.”

Later on, I watched Angela Bassett as Marie Laveau in American Horror Story: Coven, and I LOVED her. I was grateful to see her. Yet I desperately wanted more than what the show was giving me. When you are a person of color and you see movie after movie, show after show of women flinging magic, and the women are nearly always white, and if they aren’t, they are a tiny role, a villain, or “strange and exotic” . . . ? It makes you feel like shows and movies are seriously lacking. Not that I didn’t enjoy them; I watched many of them. But I wanted to also see people who weren’t white take center stage, I wanted to see them be important, strong, central; and I wanted their truths to be told—not just the “truths” that white writers and creators seemed to think were real, and consequently, that they were quick to impose on Black and Brown characters.

Then came Coven and Laveau, and . . . well, yes, but also no, because finally we had a powerful witch who was not another white woman; yet there was so much that was missing from Laveau’s narrative, so much that would be true to her experience as a Black woman. Besides this, it felt as if the Black characters in Coven had been nerfed a bit, as if we could be told they are “sooooo powerful,” but in the actual plot and narrative, they weren’t allowed to exist in ways that demonstrated this power, not to the degrees the white characters could. We were allowed to sit at the table, but we didn’t get to taste everything.

Coven was in 2013, and a lot has happened since then. Following in the footsteps of authors like Jewell Parker Rhodes and, to some degree, Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, and a few others, Kayla Hardy gives us The Quarter Queen. Hardy’s novel is a magic-drenched fantasy epic set in mid-1800s New Orleans, whose main characters are Marie Laveau and her daughter, Marie Laveau the second, here usually known as “Ree.” Laveau has been the Queen of the Quarter for a while, the high priestess of New Orleans, but an omen shows up that threatens to change everything. Related to the omen, there are whisperings of an inquisitor who might show up, and those guys are never good for local witches.

One of Hardy’s greatest strengths is her immersive style. She flexes this style right from the outset, getting you into the heads, emotions, and senses of both Marie and Ree. Mother and daughter don’t exactly get along, but they also don’t exactly not get along; it may be one of those situations where they have more in common with each other than they think. They are both haughty, they are both stubborn, and they are both powerful. On the other hand, they do have important differences. The daughter has to deal with the pressure of a legacy that she may not want, while the mother has to deal with the politics and delicate power games of a very bigoted, dangerous world. The daughter acts out, to some degree aware of her relative privilege, with part of that privilege being able to pretend that some kinds of dangers don’t exist; the mother, time and time again, tries to shove her daughter into the role that she wants her to fill, pretending that her methods aren’t just making things worse, and feeling more desperate for the impending doom of a suspicious portent. Yet ultimately, they think of each other and care about each other in an irritated, gruff kind of way; they would kill for each other. It’s the kind of situation where they will scowl and yell at each other, but if someone scowls at Marie’s daughter? If someone yells at Ree’s mom? They are quick to anger if someone else so much as glances wrong at their loved one.

Along with this complex conflict, Hardy’s book navigates the real and imagined lines of power in New Orleans. Power here is not simplistic, the way it so often is in many narratives set in this era. I think of the brilliant film Sinners in comparison. In the very beginning of Sinners, you have twin brothers who have left the Chicago gang life to purchase land and open a juke joint. Even in this deceptively simple setup, there is a discussion of the layers of power and privilege that can exist in that moment: You have an area where segregation is alive and kicking, where lynching is common, but you also have these guys who have money, guns, and confidence. They have the ability to move around the nation, at least, more so than many others. Really, each character experiences power and privilege, or lack thereof, in slightly different ways: from the mixed woman who can talk her way into the juke joint but can also hang out with white people, who is protected by white people—as long as she “behaves” herself (so: both certain freedoms and certain restrictions)—to the folks working the field, to the woman out in the woods in the shed working her magics. It’s not as simple as “enslavement” vs “freedom”; it is a careful examination of what power, privilege, and freedom look like to different people, how things are the same, how things are different, and even how Black folks exert relative power over each other. One of the brothers shoots a guy for trying to steal from his truck, demonstrating the degree of power he has relative to others; yet the white guy who sells the twins the building had planned all along to come back later and kill them, knowing he could do so with impunity. Hardy does some similar things here, exploring the way that Laveau’s position both traps her and frees her, endangers her and gives her flexibility, and the ways that different people at different places in extremely complicated social structures enjoy different kinds of privileges. Like Sinners, the threat of racial violence is thrumming through the story, but like Sinners, this story is not about the white people.

Another feature of the book is the thoroughly imagined historical setting. The place is lovingly detailed and feels supported by research without being too dense, everything serving the sense of the larger story. Between the lines of plot and world-building, subtext vibrates, along with sharper, interesting nuances for those who look closely. Meaning and subtext flow along with the narrative, hand in hand, supporting each other.

Central to the story is that idea of freedom. Especially in a place where different kinds of people have different kinds of freedom and different kinds of people also have different kinds of power. In this particular New Orleans, there are some folks who have magic as well. The presence of magic adds a layer to ideas of power, freedom, and politics. White folks would love to enslave someone who is Black, who can use some kind of magic, who they can exploit in even more ways. But having magic can also create opportunities. There are social and legal rules in place to constrain the use of magic to a degree. And you have Marie and Ree, who own businesses, and who engage with the people around them in very different ways from each other. No one is immune, however, to danger. As a baseline, even Marie and her daughter have much to fear, which creates an extra sense of pressure, since two Black women in antebellum New Orleans have to do a lot in order to maintain the kinds of freedom they have. In this sense, one of the things The Quarter Queen seems to ask is: If you have to constantly fight and live in fear, even if you think you are free, then are you actually free? It’s an important question, one that is as relevant to Marie Laveau and Ree as it is to Black and Brown people today, as well as queer people, trans people, and others, as we face legal, social, and even physical threats to our existence, to our so-called unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The book asks questions without giving easy answers, letting the reader contemplate and work their own way through the conversation, while providing the benefit of a range of perspectives and experiences.

The Quarter Queen is also a book of complex relationships, where enemies were lovers, friends harbor secrets, and more. Even those closest to you have their resentments . . . Because of this, no positions are certain, despite that some characters may temporarily convince themselves otherwise.

Look: You can read this because you love historic settings. You can read it because you need more Marie Laveau. You can get lost in the world, the drama, the conflict. You can enjoy the magical exchanges, the rituals, the fights. If you want a book that looks at how complex power, freedom, and privilege can be, you can get that, too. This book can be a lot of things for a lot of people. If you’re like me, you want all of this. You’ll be really glad that Hardy put it all together for you.