The Weight of Ash and Prayer

A novel of silence, inheritance, and the names we’re forbidden to keep.

1862, Vermilion Parish.

Marie Clementine Broussard has been raised to vanish neatly into a life chosen for her—marry well, obey quietly, and tend a household already mapped out by men who never asked what she wanted. But war does not honor boundaries. As Confederate patrols tighten and the world around her splits at the seams, a forbidden love forces Clementine to make one irrevocable decision. What follows is a life built on rumor, erasure, and letters that never reached the hands they were written for. Her silence becomes its own kind of testimony—one that refuses to stay buried.

2003, Lafayette.

Sylvie Broussard never intended to excavate her family’s past. But when a missing name in her lineage refuses to reconcile with the records, she is pulled into a history her family never meant to preserve. What begins as a single question leads her through church ledgers, courthouse archives, and family stories brittle with age. As Sylvie traces the Broussard women—what they carried, what they sacrificed, what they chose to forget—she begins to understand that Clementine’s disappearance was not an accident, but a choice.

Spanning two centuries of Louisiana’s tangled past, The Weight of Ash and Prayer braids together wartime survival, inherited shame, and the quiet defiance of women who carved lives from the margins. Through shifting voices and archival fragments, the novel asks what it costs to claim your own story—and what it means when the land remembers more than the people who live on it.

Not a love story—

a story about love, loss, and the price of being named.

For readers of The Paper Palace, The Prophets, The Known World, and Sing, Unburied, Sing.