Inspired by Slavic lore and the author’s family history, Cautionary Tales for Women & Foxes explores the power of storytelling, the seductive call of vengeance, and the deeply complicated bond between mothers and daughters.

To make them change, we must change the way the stories end.

In 1963 Detroit, Kasia returns home from a date bruised and bloodied. Her brothers want vengeance; their immigrant mother, Agnieszka, forbids the mere mention of it. Words carry power, she warns. Yet to Kasia, caught between the old world and the new, words have lost their meaning. After all, no one, not even the police, listened to hers.

In 1996, 21-year-old Sabine is at her uncle’s death bed. Her rage at the world’s horrors is a living, breathing thing fed by the cautionary tales and legends of her Polish grandmother. With his last breath, her uncle confesses to killing a man. Which man? The one who long ago hurt her mother, Kasia.

In the murky present, half a century after immigrating from Poland, Agnieszka is trapped in an isolated nursing home. No visitors, no family, just her own deteriorating memories for company—until one day, when an unlikely audience appears in the form of a fox. The fox offers her freedom in exchange for a very good story: one that trails into the past and reaches into the future.

So begins the saga of Agnieszka’s family, born in the haunted chaos of World War I and ending in 1990s Detroit, where her descendants still bear the weight of the curse that changed everything. Cautionary Tales for Women & Foxes is about mothers and daughters and the duties they have toward each other, imagined or real. It’s about how they live with pain, survive unthinkable violence. It’s about how they keep secrets and the sometimes innocent, sometimes malevolent reasons they do.