This review first appeared on our Substack in October 2025. For the next few weeks I’m using alternate Tuesdays to reprint a few months worth of reviews we published there before starting up over here.
Let’s talk about No Child of Mine by Nichelle Giraldes. I picked this up in Denver, at the tiny Tattered Cover in Denver’s Union Station. It was within walking distance of my daughter’s volleyball tournament and I wanted to unwind and look at books. I picked it, as I pick a lot of books, by scanning the shelves for titles and covers that seemed cool.
This is two stories intertwined, alternating chapter by chapter. It starts in the present with Essie and Jay moving into their dream house, an old house they plan to remodel together. They’ve been together since high school; Essie supported Sanjay through his architecture degree and now he’s supporting her through law school. She’s in her third year and couldn’t be more excited to graduate and really dive into her career. Then we flash back to the vague and distant past to meet Isabel and Ana, best friends just reaching adulthood, preparing to be married off. Neither is exactly thrilled at this but in this distant past there’s really no other option. No one’s life, present or past, goes the way they hope it will.
Essie’s trouble begins with an unexpected pregnancy. Always adamantly childfree, she decides to keep the baby but has deep misgivings about the whole motherhood thing. Aside from the terrible timing and extra difficult pregnancy, already reasons to worry, Essie’s family might also be cursed. For more generations than they can remember, it’s gone the same way. Meet the love of your life, eventually get pregnant, give birth to a healthy girl, lose the love of your life in some tragic accident. Maybe it’s a curse, maybe not, but it’s frighteningly consistent. As Essie’s pregnancy progresses and her fears about motherhood increase, she also becomes desperately worried about Sanjay’s seeming fatigue and unusual behavior. And then there are the odd whispers she hears in the house, the oddly palpable darkness, and her increasingly vivid nightmares . . .
As this story unfolds, we’re also following Isabel and Ana. Ana is married off first, and we soon discover her husband has a dark side. Isabel’s marriage is much happier but even so, it’s painfully clear that Ana is the real love of Isabel’s life and she can’t possibly find peace knowing Ana is suffering. Isabel lies awake at night trying to think up ways to rescue Ana from her brute of a husband. Then Isabel becomes pregnant and has to put her plans on hold. Still desperate to help her true love Ana, Isabel strikes a bargain with dark forces . . .
I had mixed feelings about this book. I found Isabel and Ana’s story compelling, like a great myth or fairy tale. I found parts of Essie and Sanjay’s story touching and exciting–the nightmares were quite frightening, their relationship is touching, and I was worried for Sanjay as he tried valiantly to support his unhappy wife while falling into darkness himself. I had a hard time connecting with Essie herself, though. I sympathized with her fears and with her frustration at being endlessly sick and on bedrest when she just wanted to power through her last year of law school. I felt for her but I also felt she played the victim to a weird degree. Essie is described as ambitious, a planner, a fierce woman who lives for a challenge, but the second she finds out she’s pregnant she kind of throws her problem solving skills out the window.
It seems like everyone around her offered to support any choice she made about this baby–everyone knew she didn’t want kids and no one pressured her to keep the pregnancy. In fact, I’m betting Sanjay would have got a vasectomy for her if she’d asked him to. She’s solely keeping this baby because she decided she wants it but for most of the book she acts kind of helpless about it in a way I found off putting. She spends most of her time repetitively worrying that this baby—the one she insists on having solely because she wants it—is going to completely ruin her life. Fair enough, she’s anxious and rumination happens. But rumination is not the same as character development and Essie is pretty boring to read about.
Still, Essie did start to find herself again near the end and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the book overall and I thought the connections of the past with the present were mostly well done. I love a good haunted house (or haunted person) and this book satisfied on that score. I wouldn’t put it in my top ten but I’d recommend it for anyone who enjoys dark stories focused on women, especially if you like a bit of a love story mixed in.
Darker Books 