Growing up in the small community of Lazy Creek, Mississippi, Karasha Brewer learned early that love and loss arrive together, hand in hand.

When her mother dies, ten-year-old Karasha is left navigating a world that seems determined to swallow her whole. A volatile brother, a silent grief-stricken father, and dangers lurking inside the very neighborhood she calls home. The only thing standing between her and the wreckage is her fierce, cigarette-smoking, gun-wielding big sister Derna, who refuses to let their family come completely undone.

But the revelations are just beginning. As Karasha grows from girl to woman, the secrets her mother carried to her grave slowly surface. Secrets about identity, about love, about the choices we make and what they cost the people who come after us. From the dirt roads of Lazy Creek to a new life she never could have imagined, Karasha must reckon with violence, desire, loss upon loss, and the complicated grace of being loved imperfectly by imperfect people.

Some Price to Pay is a sweeping, deeply felt story about what it means to survive. Not just the tragedies life hands you, but the ones your family passes down. Written with the warmth of a gospel hymn and the honesty of a confession, it asks: when the people we love are gone, what do we owe the living?