Love & Other Curses

Overview

Michael Thomas Ford's Love & Other Curses centers on a teenager growing up inside a family whose romantic history is tangled up with an old, half-believed curse. The novel blends small-town domestic life with a thread of folklore, using the idea of an inherited misfortune as a lens for a much more ordinary story about figuring out who you are while everyone around you has already decided who you should be.

At the heart of the book is a protagonist working through a fluid sense of gender identity, trying to reconcile that evolving self-understanding with family expectations, a hometown that doesn't always make room for ambiguity, and the pull of a first serious romance. Ford keeps the register light and often funny even as the emotional stakes rise.

The result is a coming-of-age story that uses its fantastical premise sparingly, letting the curse function more as metaphor and plot engine than as the book's real subject. The real subject is the slower, riskier work of self-definition.

Family Legend and the Weight of Inheritance

Ford situates the novel in a lineage of stories about families bound by superstition, where a single ancestral mistake is said to echo down through generations. That device lets the book explore how families pass down not just traditions but also anxieties, and how a young person can feel obligated to live inside a narrative they never chose.

The gender-identity thread gives the curse motif added resonance: both are frameworks imposed from outside that the protagonist must examine rather than simply accept. Within the broader landscape of contemporary YA, the novel sits alongside other titles that use a genre premise — in this case, light fantasy and small-town legend — to make an identity story more approachable for readers who might not pick up something framed purely as issue-driven fiction. Its tone, closer to romantic comedy than to the somber register many such narratives adopt, has been part of its appeal to teen readers and to adults looking for a gentler entry point into these conversations.

Why Love & Other Curses Has Been Challenged

Gender identity is the central point of contention raised against this book. Because the protagonist is genderfluid and the narrative treats that identity as simply one more fact of the character's life rather than a problem to be solved, some challengers have argued the book promotes a view of gender they consider inappropriate for school libraries or young readers. Related objections have also pointed to the book's handling of teen romance and physical attraction as unsuitable for the age group it targets. In the catalog tracked here, the title has drawn 2 state-level and 2 district-level challenges, most of them framed around concerns that the material conflicts with particular community or family values regarding gender and sexuality rather than around any single passage or scene.