{"product_id":"death-mother-amy-wertz-9798257841811","title":"Death Mother: A Vishakanya Child","description":"\u003cp\u003eJazmin Bane has built her career on a simple belief: monsters aren't real-only the stories we tell to make sense of the world. As a cultural anthropologist, she travels across continents collecting folklore, tracing how fear and memory shape the myths people pass down through generations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the deserts of India, she finds one that refuses to behave like a story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAcross centuries of records-colonial journals, village testimonies, forgotten archives-the same woman appears again and again. She does not age. She walks the same roads at dusk. And wherever she stands, life itself recoils. Flies fall dead from the air around her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJazmin expects to explain it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInstead, she meets her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe truth is older, stranger, and far more dangerous than folklore: a hidden sisterhood of women known as the Vishakanya-poison maidens whose bodies have been transformed by something biological and ancient. They live for centuries. They cannot be touched. And for generations, they have been hunted, captured, and weaponized by anyone who discovers what they are.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut Jazmin's discovery doesn't stay in the past.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBack home in Maryland, her four-year-old niece Lily begins drawing a flower she has never seen-a white bloom with seven petals and a dark center. She talks about women calling to her. About something waiting.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe same calling that transforms girls into Vishakanya.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs Lily's body begins to change, Jazmin is forced into a world she can neither expose nor escape. To save her niece, she must enter the sisterhood's hidden archive-a record of four centuries of survival, violence, and sacrifice-and accept a role that will cost her everything she has built.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBecause the truth isn't something she can publish.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt's something she has to protect.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd once you learn what the Vishakanya are, there is no walking away.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDEATH MOTHER\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e is a literary horror novel about inheritance as transformation, the body as a weapon, and the cost of protecting a truth the world was never meant to survive.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor readers of \u003ci\u003eAnnihilation\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMexican Gothic, and The Only Good Indians.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Amy Wertz\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798257841811\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/18\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 256\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.76lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.54d","brand":"Amy Wertz","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50665475047679,"sku":"9798257841811","price":20.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/death-mother-amy-wertz-9798257841811","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}