The Empire of Dirt

There has always been tension in the "blind house," where Valentina lives with her mother and grandmother in the Italian countryside. Valentina's pious grandmother often hints at a family curse, and Valentina's mother scoffs at superstition; it's one of many points of friction between them, and one of the battlegrounds on which they fight to control Valentina's upbringing.

But in the summer of 1996, when Valentina is twelve, she gets her period for the first time--and the curse suddenly becomes frighteningly real. Blood leaks from the walls; the house and farm are overrun with frogs; the kitchen crawls with flies. Valentina is certain that she is the cause of this cascading apocalypse, that she has brought catastrophe to the house and its inhabitants. In this propulsive coming-of-age novel, of mother-daughter relationships and painful family legacies, the events of one terrifying, transformative summer cast a long shadow.