57 pages • 1 hour read
This Poison Heart
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Briseis Greene, who has the magical power to control plants, works at her adoptive mothers’ flower shop. Today, she listens as her mother Thandie, who Briseis calls “Mom,” explains to a regular customer, Mr. Hughes, that they cannot fill his weekly order for 12 white roses due to a shipment error. Although Briseis knows that it is dangerous to risk revealing her powers, she takes a single leftover white rose and hides in a small garden, using her abilities to magically grow six white roses. She does not risk growing the full 12, as doing so would lead the other plants in the garden to respond too noticeably to her powers. Mr. Hughes is thrilled, but Thandie frowns. Although Briseis is happy to have helped, she knows that she cannot make it a habit to use her powers. The last time she pushed her powers too far, her neighbor’s tree grew so rapidly that it broke down a fence. Her powers, which she has had since childhood, became hard to control when she first turned 12.
Now, when Briseis reveals that she grew all six flowers from a single pistil, Thandie is both impressed and concerned. She urges her daughter to relax and enjoy her summer vacation after a “tough” year. (Briseis inadvertently launched an ecological protest after she casually suggested that the rapid growth of her English teacher’s potted plants and trees was caused by toxic chemicals, although her magical powers were actually to blame.) Now, despite Briseis’s protest that she loves working in the shop, Thandie insists that she have fun—a stance that her other mom, Angie, who Briseis calls “Mo,” echoes when she arrives. Angie and Thandie tease Briseis about what “kids do these days” until Briseis leaves the shop (17).
In her family’s humid apartment (which is kept hot to reduce air conditioning costs), Briseis’s thriving tropical plants rustle and move toward her. She hides them in her room so that nobody but her parents will witness her powers. She is relieved to let her powers loose, even as she wonders how they work. She hopes to gain some answers from the college-level botany course she has applied to take.
To Briseis’s disappointment, an email from her academic counselor tells her that her GPA is too low to allow her to take the college botany course. As she thinks about her difficult relationship with school, where she feels constant worry over the danger of her secret being discovered, she recalls an incident as a child in which she ate poisonous berries but suffered no ill effects, except the feeling of coolness that she experiences whenever she handles toxic plants. She heads to Prospect Park, where she is secretly growing one specific toxic plant called a water hemlock.
Chapter 2 Summary
Briseis travels to the Ravine, the only forest in Brooklyn and the only place in which Briseis feels safe to test the limits of her abilities. She photographs her hidden plant, the highly toxic water hemlock. She takes notes on the plant’s growth, including the greater effort it takes for her to urge poisonous plants to bloom. She harvests a sample, which she intends to take home for a few hours for study before destroying it.
Returning home, she dissects the poisonous plant, but Angie startles her just as she cuts into the most dangerous section. As a result, she transfers the plant’s deadly liquid directly into her bloodstream. The cold sensation moves through her arm, convincing her that she is about to die. She tells Angie she loves her, and her serious tone alarms Angie and Thandie. However, as the minutes pass, Briseis is astonished to realize that she feels no ill effects. She calls her friend Gabby, to whom she hasn’t spoken for months. Gabby knows a bit about Briseis’s powers, though she represses this knowledge. Briseis recounts the misadventure with the hemlock (leaving out the information about its toxicity), but Gabby only asks if she’s “ever tried, you know…not being weird around plants” (31). Annoyed, Briseis counters that her parents own a flower shop.
The two banter about Gabby’s terrible babysitting job, but Gabby’s dismissiveness about Briseis’s plants reminds Briseis of the underlying reason for the distance between them. They discuss their mutual friend Marlon, with whom they have spoken less frequently since they both moved to Staten Island. Despite their proximity, Briseis and Gabby have also drifted apart. Briseis wistfully wishes for an element of her life to remain untouched by her secret powers. After they hang up, she inspects the still-bleeding cut on her finger. Thinking back to meeting Marlon and Gabby in elementary school, she wonders if revealing her secret would be better than pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Chapter 3 Summary
The next day, Briseis tries to ignore the thought that the hemlock should have killed her. As she goes through her morning routine, she overhears her moms discussing the family’s money troubles, so she offers to get a summer job to help out. Her parents refuse, stating that the financial issues are their problems to solve, not Briseis’s. The three go out to get breakfast but are forced to hurry home when the trees begin to noticeably move in response to Briseis’s presence.
During a busy workday, Briseis gets a text from Gabby, who brushes off their tentative plans. Thandie hurries out of the shop to take a call, and minutes later, Angie also looks concerned in response to a call. She summons Briseis upstairs, leaving the store in the care of Jake, a family friend and occasional employee. Angie and Thandie tell Briseis that her biological mother’s sister has died, leaving Briseis her estate. Briseis is confused but not upset. The three decide to see what is included in the bequest, believing that it might help solve their financial concerns.
Chapter 4 Summary
Several days later, Briseis and her parents wait for Mrs. Redmond, the estate attorney. Briseis’s plants have grown restless in response to her anxiety, and the family worries that the plants will try to emerge from her room in front of the lawyer. Mrs. Redmond arrives and reveals that Briseis has inherited a house, 40 acres of land, and some of her aunt’s personal possessions in the town of Rhinebeck in upstate New York. She warns that Circe Colchis, Briseis’s biological aunt, was eccentric and has left several notes that are for Briseis’s eyes only. She urges Briseis to “keep an open mind when she [sees] the place” (48). A stipulation to the inheritance states that Briseis cannot sell or change the property until she is 18. Mrs. Redmond gives Briseis two keys: a large skeleton key and a small modern key.
Briseis’s long-standing concern about being so close to the natural world intensifies when Mrs. Redmond comments that Rhinebeck is “not quite what [they would] expect” due to the “colorful characters” there (50). Angie is unconcerned, but Thandie calls herself “a pessimist.” Despite her own trepidation, Briseis insists on spending the summer at the house; she plans to help her parents by using her power to build up new inventory for the shop. Briseis confesses to feeling relief at temporarily escaping her normal life, and they all agree to depart in a few days. Briseis feels a mix of enthusiasm and uneasiness, worrying she won’t be able to control her powers.
Chapter 5 Summary
Prior to their departure, Briseis uses her power to bloom hundreds of red roses. This feat exhausts her, and when Angie forbids her to continue building up their inventory with magic, Briseis worries that her mother is secretly afraid of her. The family travels to Rhinebeck, which Briseis finds to be shockingly small after the hustle of Brooklyn. She worries about the many trees, even as Thandie laughingly calls the town “heaven.” When they see the house, Briseis worries about its overgrown grounds but realizes that the remote location will help her to keep her secret. Inside, the house is large and grand. They explore, and Briseis finds a locked door that is engraved with leaves and ivy. Briseis jokes about being possessed, which spooks Thandie, whose family respects folk magic practices. The skeleton key opens the locked door, and they find a room with floor-to-ceiling shelves full of glass jars. Each jar is labeled with the name of the dried plant it contains. On the top shelf, which is accessible via a walkway, Briseis finds water hemlock root. Shocked, she looks at the other jars on the top shelf and realizes that they all contain poisons. Thandie concludes that the space is an apothecary, leading Briseis to silently wonder about the poisons.
They find a photo of three Black women who resemble Briseis. Briseis tells Thandie that seeing this photo that is likely of her biological family makes their explorations of the house feel “heavier.” They explore the rest of the house, enjoying the luxury of space that contrasts with their small apartment. Briseis finds some withered plants, which come back to life when she touches them. Angie and Briseis become excited about the possibility of spending the summer in Rhinebeck, but Thandie, who suffers from intense allergies, is less convinced. Briseis is surprised to discover stairs to a third floor, and the family heads up to investigate.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In addition to crafting the basic premise, the opening chapters of the novel are dedicated to introducing the complex challenges that Briseis faces as she resists Embracing Hidden Talents. While she firmly believes that keeping her magical powers a secret is the only viable option, the volatility of her gift makes this approach unsustainable, and her early mishaps with plants are intended to foreshadow the greater difficulties that she will experience in controlling her powers once she visits Rhinebeck. Significantly, while she is also plagued with a variety of real-world troubles such as the family’s money issues and her strained relationship with Gabby, each of these troubles highlights a problematic intersection with The Burden of Secrets, as her mundane problems are often caused by her magical powers and her efforts to keep them concealed. For example, her estrangement from her friend Gabby first occurred after Gabby learned a bit about Briseis’s power with plants. While the falling-out between the two friends is a common real-world problem for teens, the stakes of this particular falling-out are heightened by the novel’s fantastical elements, as Briseis’s most prominent worry is that her powers will be discovered. A similar parallel exists in Briseis’s other social troubles, as her scholastic challenges are also a result of her need to hide her powers. Likewise, she is frustrated that her powers are insufficient to boost her moms’ struggling flower shop and worries that even her own parents view her talents with wariness.
Additionally, the news of the protagonist’s inheritance is designed to allow the author to examine fantasy elements within a realistic context. Although the house and its grounds are an unexpected windfall, the estate is not a direct solution to the family’s problems despite the compatibility of Briseis’s talents with the plant-filled property. The time away from Brooklyn offers Briseis some distance from her interpersonal and academic troubles, but the notion of being so near the natural world concerns her; Briseis’s idea of being too close to nature involves anything beyond the very limited green spaces of city life. However, as the novel progresses, the balance between these problems (and the extent to which the move to Rhinebeck alleviates or worsens them) will shift dramatically.
It is also important to note that these chapters introduce Bayron’s distinctive approach to centering her characters’ Black racial identities as the presumed experience within the narrative. While Briseis will eventually make explicit references to being a Black teen, the early chapters of the novel use subtler cues to orient readers to the racial identity of the characters. This presumption that having a Black heritage is a recognizably standard identity combats the frequent presumption in the American literary sphere that any character whose race is not explicitly mentioned must be white. In this way, Bayron challenges the racist positioning of white characters as standard or “normal,” implicitly pointing out that such a biased perspective inevitably casts any characters who are not white as “other.” In fact, the author deliberately reverses this biased approach by explicitly mentioning race only when a white character is introduced, as such an event is a rarity in a novel whose cast consists almost entirely of Black people. Bayron also adopts a similar approach in her presentation of LGTBQ+ identities in her novel; she deliberately leaves those identities unremarked upon in a manner that connotes casual acceptance.
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