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  • Published: 5 March 2024
  • ISBN: 9781464221323
  • Imprint: Sourcebooks Fire
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $24.00

The Poisons We Drink





The Poisons We Drink is a potent YA debut about a world where love potions are weaponized against hate and prejudice, sisterhood is unbreakable, and self-love is life and death.

In a country divided between humans and witchers, Venus Stoneheart hustles as a brewer making illegal love potions to support her family.

Love potions is a dangerous business. Brewing has painful, debilitating side effects, and getting caught means death or a prison sentence. But what Venus is most afraid of is the dark, sentient magic within her.

Then an enemy's iron bullet kills her mother, Venus's life implodes. Keeping her reckless little sister Janus safe is now her responsibility. When the powerful Grand Witcher, the ruthless head of her coven, offers Venus the chance to punish her mother's killer, she has to pay a steep price for revenge. The cost? Brew poisonous potions to enslave D.C.'s most influential politicians.

As Venus crawls deeper into the corrupt underbelly of her city, the line between magic and power blurs, and it's hard to tell who to trust…Herself included.

The Poisons We Drink is a potent YA debut about a world where love potions are weaponized against hate and prejudice, sisterhood is unbreakable, and self-love is life and death.

  • Published: 5 March 2024
  • ISBN: 9781464221323
  • Imprint: Sourcebooks Fire
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $24.00

About the author

Bethany Baptiste

Bethany Baptiste is an inner-city educator by day and a young adult SFF novelist by night. If she’s not writing a lesson plan or a story, she does retail therapy in Florida bookstores and takes scheduled naps with her three chaotic evil dogs. You can visit her at bethanybaptiste.com or @storysorcery on Twitter.

Praise for The Poisons We Drink

A fresh take on magic systems to deliver a searing critique of power, politics, and injustice.

Publishers Weekly

Bethany's prose is effortlessly lush, vivid, and impactful in this emotional and empowering story of a young Black witcher finding her power in a world intent on destroying it.

Sarah Underwood, New York Times bestselling author of Lies We Sing to the Sea

In her powerful debut, Baptiste explores all aspects of the word, taking readers to a dystopian Washington, DC, where an intricate magic system is in place and Venus Stoneheart is trying to make ends meet.

Aurora Dominguez, Booklist