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The Blessed

 

Suri Daniels is the descendant of a family of supernaturally gifted women known as The Blessed who literally hold keys to gateways between the earthly plane and seven powerful gods.

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Layla Jefferies is the child of a top tier level demon and a human woman who has lived a life of quietude until she's drawn out of seclusion to assist with protecting the gateways and saving Suri from becoming a vengeful demon's avatar.

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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.

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Content advisory: Opening chapter includes a depiction of sexual violence and rape.

Dear Readers...

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 the People of Color, particularly Women of Color, in this country have endured, which was violent, painful and 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
 

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