This Poison Heart

Briseis’s journey to Rhinebeck with her moms inherently combines questions of family and kinship making for adoptees, as she lives in a house previously owned by her birth family, and both she and her adoptive mothers must come to terms with the legacy that she inherited from that family. In the beginning of the novel, Briseis takes a relatively straightforward approach to the realities of her adoption. She has always known that she was adopted and has little curiosity about her birth family despite her difficulties with controlling her magical affinity for plants. She is extremely close with Thandie and Angie and considers her bond with them to be the central relationship in her life. Although the arrival of Mrs. Redmond and the announcement that Briseis has allegedly inherited a house from her birth aunt, Circe Colchis, brings questions of Briseis’s biological family to the fore, her initial motivation in moving to Rhinebeck is to provide for her family members—Thandie and Angie—who are struggling financially.

Once she arrives in Rhinebeck, however, Briseis is compelled to modify her definition of family as she faces representations of the women in her birth family and finds herself struck by the physical resemblance between herself and them.