Books book reviews Blood and the Beast: On Sundays She Picks Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield Mahvesh Murad reviews Yah Yah Scholfield’s debut novel. By Mahvesh Murad | Published on February 18, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Atlanta, 1965. Ma’am beats her daughter as casually and carelessly as she has done for 41 years, but this time she cracks Jude’s head, and Jude finally snaps. After a lifetime of abuse at the hands of the one person who should have protected her, Jude unleashes all the anger she has been directing at her own self, at her mother: “aren’t there spiders who eat their mothers,” she finds herself thinking, “the only way out is through.” Yah Yah Scholfield’s debut novel On Sundays She Picked Flowers opens brutally, with violence and pain and anger and terrible raw visceral images that linger on, even when there are many other horrors to be witnessed along the course of the story.  After a gruesome escape from her childhood home, Jude finds herself in the swampy forests of southern Georgia, where a somewhat kinder and marginally less racist white woman she encounters tells her that she can go live in an abandoned house on what used to be a plantation. Everyone who comes near that house is frightened away by it, but Jude, who has seen so much worse, experienced so much worse at her own mother’s hands, is not afraid of this haunted space. The old manor’s disquiet reflects Jude’s own; both are haunted by violence, by rage and sadness. The house and the land around it are soaked through by the years of slavery that took place there, the blood and the pain of the enslaved as much a part of the landscape now as the trees and streams are. Scholfield’s descriptions of the house itself are lush and visceral, the language easily setting the house up as something alive, something with its own dark heart beating aggressively.  “It was a plain house, all splintered columns and discoloured wood, its disorder like a caul over a newborn’s face.” Jude knows as soon as she enters that every frightening story the locals have told about the house is, in fact, true. She senses right away that “there were haints in the cellar, ghouls trapped up in the bricks and behind the wallpaper, stashed like jewels beneath the floorboards and crowded up the chimney. Yes, of course, there were spirits there, malignant and benign, festering in the well, clogging the pipes. The grounds, steeped with Black blood, released noxious gases, […]to squat over the house, to sicken it and its inhabitants. Malevolent and sticky, left too long to stew in its ugliness, the house churned as it adjusted to Jude’s presence. Jude, nauseous and vertiginous, felt the house’s discomfort as her own…” Eventually, Jude and the house come to terms with each other. She acknowledges its pain, introduces her own, comforts it and herself, and names the house Candle. “Like a mutt brought indoors, bathed and fed and collared, it came to heel. Naturally it being a wild and possessed thing, it was not always obedient; it had its moments of pique, tantrums of cutlery and petulant furniture, but now when she called its name, it heeded her, and like its namesake, it burned in the dark.” They settle around each other, haunted house and haunted woman, until they each find a home in the other’s existence, no longer fearful. What Jude does not understand and does fear though, is the presence of a threatening beast that hovers around her and Candle, never making itself visible, but remaining just on the periphery. It leaves her gifts of meat in the mornings, “mauled remains of animals thrown haphazardly onto her porch… occasionally there were other gifts, flashy candy wrappers from the town, but death reigned supreme.” Jude, afraid at first, grows to think fondly of this threat too, given it does not actually harm her. She accepts the meat, indulging her hunger for blood, viscera, fear. Years go by like this, and the beast, “her beast, her animal that stalked her and terrified her and fed her so well—kept no schedule. Sometimes, it came daily and sometimes, Jude wouldn’t see it for weeks, months, and once, not for four lonely years.” Buy the Book On Sundays She Picked Flowers Yah Yah Scholfield Buy Book On Sundays She Picked Flowers Yah Yah Scholfield Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Jude is a little lonely in her new home, but learns from the lush forests around the house, evolving and changing from the angry woman she was when she arrived, to a calmer wiser woman, a healer who has some respect from the townspeople now: “All that she was was of her own invention. In sunlight and solitude, she bloomed.”  Then a stranger shows up at the door one day, unannounced, a woman to whom Jude feels an immediate attraction. Nemoira is beautiful but somehow dangerous and strange, and Jude looks at her and “feels a pang of hunger.” There is something odd about Nemoira, not just that she stands as if “new to her body,” but also in the way she causally makes demands of Jude, in the way she comfortably settles into the house with her, in the way she immediately steps in to take care of Jude when she is sick, as if she always belonged there with her. She and Jude share a sexual charge that develops into a relationship that is wild and passionate, and always always on the very edge of something dangerous, as Jude finally gives in to desires she has repressed her entire life. “You can’t deny nature,” says Nemoira, and Jude does not. They fall into a rhythm together, but it remains somehow unsettling, for Jude and for the reader. Nemoira asks about the beast, wondering why Jude doesn’t just shoot it down, and Jude confesses “I don’t want it to leave me. It scares me, but it excites me too, the feeling of something so… so massive caring enough to stalk me and come into my house, to leave deer on my porch. It’s like having a god that looks only at you.” But Jude also looks to Nemoira as if she is something holy, as she is able to satisfy a need in Jude that she has only just been able to name. With Nemoira, Jude is able to really become herself; she is able to let go of insecurities she had as a child, when she was repeatedly told she was “too fat, too Black, too tall, and too damn ugly.” She is desired, and desires in return, and does not need to hide. With Nemoira, Jude has to confront everything about herself, including her deepest feelings about violence. She has to look at her childhood and her past, and take into account things that she hadn’t known or hadn’t wanted to know about herself and her mother. Who is Nemoira? And is Jude really willing to look at everything Nemoira has brought into her life?  While Schofield’s language is lush, images rich and dark and often lovely, the main problem with the overall narrative is that Jude’s story with her mother’s family (which is where we start) never quite sits smoothly alongside Jude and Nemoira’s story. The two plots sort of run in parallel (not in time or space, but just as storylines). But perhaps that is okay. Knowing more about Jude’s mother, her parents, and sisters only adds to our understanding of Jude herself, and to the ideas of generational trauma, buried secrets, feminine rage, and terrible cycles of abuse within families.  On Sunday’s She Picked Flowers is very much a Southern gothic horror, both thematically and in Scholfield’s use of language. It is essentially about Jude’s rewilding, as it were, and the slow blooming of a woman who must learn to accept the darkest parts of herself in order to love freely, and to accept love only in the form she needs.[end-mark] On Sundays She Picked Flowers is published by Saga Press. The post Blood and the Beast: <i>On Sundays She Picks Flowers</i> by Yah Yah Scholfield appeared first on Reactor.