Monique R. Roumo

About

Monique R. Roumo

Monique R. Roumo.

Monique R. Roumo writes lyrical romantic fantasy that gives women permission — permission to grieve, to remember, to be fully, messily, gloriously themselves.

Her work turns the quiet, unspoken experiences of women into stories where magic mirrors emotion, where gardens hold truths too dangerous to speak aloud, and where the most revolutionary act is choosing to feel deeply in a world that demands numbness. She writes characters drawn from the people she loves, so that each book is a tribute to the women who shaped her.

The Bloodroot Sisterhood was born from the beautiful and complicated legacy her mother, Marion Divine Roumo, left to her and her sisters after her sudden passing in 2022. Through grief, Monique found that the stories we inherit — the permissions granted and withheld, the love given imperfectly, the truths spoken too late or just in time — are themselves a form of magic worth preserving.

Guided by her faith and by the ancestral message that we come from greatness — a truth she claimed on a life-changing journey to Nigeria — her work celebrates identity, resilience, and the revolutionary power of memory as resistance.

What makes her work different

The specificity of her truth is what makes it universal. Monique writes from lived experience — Black women, mothers and daughters, sisters navigating loss — with enough emotional precision that readers of every background recognise themselves in her gardens.

Her magic systems aren't about power; they're about permission. Her romances aren't about rescue; they're about being seen. Her fantasies don't offer escape; they offer a mirror.

She writes for the women who have been told their grief is too much, their anger too loud, their needs too selfish.

She writes to say: you are allowed.

Monique lives in Maryland, where she tends the garden of her soul and believes the most dangerous stories are the ones that give women permission to take up space.

See the books

Where the five came from

Five women. Five books.

Marion Divine Roumo, the author’s mother.
Marion Divine Roumo — the first Divine.
The author and her three sisters.
My sisters and me.
The author, her three sisters and their mother together on holiday.
All five of us, on one of many holidays.

My mother, Marion Divine. My sisters and me. All five of us.

There are five books because there were five of us. My mother, Marion Divine, and her four daughters.

The Tea Witch's Garden is the mother's book. The four that follow belong to her daughters, one apiece.

None of them is a portrait. Yamara isn't one of my sisters and Chisara isn't another. But the sisterhood is ours — the way we close ranks, the way we argue, the way four women can grieve the same woman in four completely different registers and still end up at the same kitchen table.

“In loving memory of my mother, Marion Divine — the first Divine — whose legacy of love became this story's heartbloom.”

A note on how these books were made

I used AI to write these books, and I used it proudly. I know some people will judge me for that. That is all right — it only means these books were not written for them.

The story is mine. The world, the law, the garden, the five flowers, the four sisters and what each of them can and cannot say — those came out of my life, my mother's death, and my sisters. Every decision about what is true in this world is mine. Every page has been read, argued with, sent back, and approved by me.

What AI gave me was a collaborator that never got tired: a thought-partner to test an idea against at eleven at night, an editor that could hold five books of continuity in its head at once, and a writer who could put on the page what I could already see. I fed it my thoughts, and it gave them shape.

There are people walking around with whole stories inside them and no way to get them out. That was me. This gave me a way through, and I am not going to apologise for finding a door.