This Poison Heart

This Poison Heart is a young adult fantasy novel by the American writer Kalynn Bayron, published in 2021. It follows a girl whose power over plants is as much a danger to her as it is a gift, and who has been taught to treat it as something to conceal.

Briseis can bring a plant out of a seed with a single touch. Her parents have moved her from place to place and shown her how to keep the ability hidden, because it does not distinguish between the roses she wants and the poison she does not. Then an aunt she never met dies and leaves her an estate in rural New York.

The family travels upstate hoping that a house full of plants will help Bri learn to govern what she can do. What they find is a walled garden planted with some of the most poisonous species in the world, a set of instructions left for her, and a town with its own opinions about who she is. Bri sets out to establish what her inheritance actually is, and who has been waiting for her to claim it.