Signs, Symbols, and Omens: A Reading List of Books Featuring Superstitions

I have a long and complicated relationship with superstitions. Being raised in an Italian family means you’re schooled early and often in the myriad ways to avoid bad luck, or worse. Never put a hat on a bed, always leave from the same door you entered, do not even think about passing a baby over a table or decorating your house with the hint of an image of an owl.

As a child these rules were mysterious, as a teen they became annoying. I wanted control over my life and luck. But all that mysteriously shifted when I started planning my wedding. I suddenly found myself following every single ancestral omen. Including peonies in my decor for prosperity and wearing something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue felt like the least I could do to put myself in good favor with the gods of marriage.

Since my wedding one-eighty, I’ve been fascinated by how superstitions show up in our cultures and what purpose they truly serve. Are they rules we follow to honor our heritage? Or are they personal pathways to a feeling of control?

I wanted to explore all these question and more in my novel The Heirloom. My heroine Shea’s own Italian family gifted her the superstition that engagement rings carry the karma from all the marriages in which they’ve been worn (yes, mine believes the same). After her beloved boyfriend proposes with a vintage ring, Shea’s belief becomes so consuming that she journeys around the world to uncover every prior owner of her 1920s bauble.

The plot engine is her search to learn whether her ring will pass along happily ever after energy into her own marriage. But the deeper story becomes Shea realizing that her belief may be a mask for real and reasonable fears around committing to forever. In my novel the superstition is a way to ask much bigger questions about life and love.

These six books do the same, exploring the topic from every angle. In some an omen defines the character’s struggle, in others its used as a thematic point, and in one the belief runs so deep it’s presented as fact. That one would be my Italian grandmother’s favorite.

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Jennifer Weiner, Big Summer

Jennifer Weiner dives into the very tense world that my own main character fears: a wedding weekend. Our eyes in are through Daphne who is cajoled into being the maid-of-honor for her ex best friend Drue. Much has changed in the years since the fight that ended their friendship. Daphne feels like she’s meeting Drue all over again, and at one of the trickiest moments in her life.

Of course superstitions about ensuring a happy marriage enter the mix. Drue insists on one that was new to even me: she believes her wedding will be cursed if she buys her own wedding dress. Here belief systems inform the way we behave as friends and reveal what matters most at the most important times in our life.

Yangsze Choo, The Night Tiger

There are two ancient Chinese superstitions at the center of this sweeping novel set in colonial Malaysia: the belief that there are men who turn into tigers and an equally powerful omen about the bad luck found inside a severed finger. Yangsze Choo somehow weaves those two wild ideas into the grounded, heartwarming and universal stories of determined young servant Ren who is searching for said finger and Ji Lina, a dressmaker and dancer that happens to have found it along her own winding journey.

But the tie that binds every character in this expansive tale is the idea that ancient, often unspoken rules govern all.

Morgan Jerkins, Caul Baby

Here the powerful dream of motherhood meets a mythical tradition around healing. The powerful Melancon family of Harlem, New York are known for their caul, a layer of skin that can heal those in its possession. Laila is desperate for a child after years of heartbreaking struggle, but her hopes to secure a caul falls through, eerily just before her niece, Amara, ends up having a baby magically possessing of its own caul.

Caul Baby was a fascinating way to express the intensity of our desire for family connection and the lasting power of family belief.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

There is a quote in Donna Tartt’s incredible novel that serves as sort of omen for all that befalls the group of Classics students at the story’s center: “Pragmatists are often strangely superstitions. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?” This question presents itself over and over again throughout the story as the students wrestle with what is logical, true and right over the more fantastical ideas they start to believe, and to which they ultimately fall victim.

The story becomes a sort of microcosm of the Roman empire itself filled with backstabbing, power struggles and death.

Toni Morrison, Sula

Omens abound for Sula in Toni Morrison’s rich, fictional world, but interestingly only after she returns to her home after a decade away. Here it is as if Sula herself is the manifestation of a superstition about what happens when you break free from the rules of your upbringing to chart a life of your own. Sula is plagued by birds, a harbinger of evil and develops a birthmark that many believe looks like a snake.

Ultimately bad luck follows, as Sula continues to live her life in an uncompromising manner, paving her own way through the consequences.

Carolyn Huynh, The Fortunes of Jaded Women

A different form of superstition looms over the characters in The Fortunes of Jaded Women.  Generations ago Oanh dared to end her marriage in pursuit of love prompting a Vietnamese witch to curse her descendants into life without love, happiness or the chance to birth sons.

In present day, Mai Nguyen Oanh’s current descendant Mai Nguyen knows this fate well. She’s struggled through a divorce, is constantly at odds with her sisters and cannot seem to manage her challenged three daughters. But there is so much levity surrounding the idea of doomed fate in this multi-character world, which is ultimately about how we grieve then mend as a family with very bad luck—witch-gifted or not.

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The Heirloom by Jessie Rosen is available via Putnam.