The Catalain Book of Secrets Books in Order

The Catalain books are where Jess Lourey leans into family magic, old wounds, and the eerie beauty of a small Minnesota town that seems to breathe with its own history. The series is set in Faith Falls, where secrets do not stay buried for long and every twenty-five years the ground sends up a flood of snakes, a strange sign that truth and trouble are both on their way.

This is the kind of series where the house matters.

At the center is a line of women with different gifts and a shared burden. In The Catalain Book of Secrets, the family's magic runs through charms, herbs, spells, intuition, and the wisdom stored in the hidden book that gives the series its name. The women are bound to one another by love, resentment, duty, and a curse that reaches back generations. An old act of violence opened the door to that curse, and the story turns on what happens when the family can no longer avoid naming the damage it did.

Faith Falls gives the series its mood. It is cozy on the surface, but there is always something crooked underneath, old grief, local legend, a dangerous man, or the sense that the land remembers more than the townspeople do. That makes the books feel part magical realism, part gothic family drama. The danger is real, but so is the tenderness. Lourey is just as interested in sisters, mothers, daughters, and the ways women protect each other, or fail to, as she is in spells and omens.

Seven Daughters offers a more intimate doorway into this world. It follows Helena Catalain, whose handmade candies carry a little magic of their own, just as another snake season brings hard truth to the surface. That novella shows the series at a smaller scale, where love, shame, illness, and healing sit right beside the supernatural. It is a good match for the larger novel, which widens the lens to the whole family and the secret history surrounding them.

The magic here is never just decoration.

If you like stories where the supernatural grows directly out of family memory, this series has a lot to offer. Expect a strong sense of place, emotionally tangled women, and a plot that keeps asking whether a family can survive once its oldest lies are finally spoken aloud. It is haunting, but it is also hopeful.