Condensed from Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
26 July 2008
This author has BLOOD on the brain; and a pact with Satan:
In 1997 Tananaive Due wrote My Soul to Keep
From the beginning, Jessica knows that David is different, but life with him seems perfect. With the birth of their daughter, life should be blissful. However, his ageless face and his perfect skin cause her investigative-reporter instincts to start questioning. Also, his lack of interest in the events of her life and work cause her to doubt the completeness of their marriage. By chance, a newspaper story Jessica writes on elder care evolves into a book proposal. Research into one of the cases leads mysteriously to David.... As the story develops, Jessica learns the truth about her husband and the choice he made so many centuries ago. David sold his soul for eternal life on Earth. He tells her he is not David, but Dawit, an immortal. Now he is offering her the same choice, against the doctrine of this secret society of believers. Readers are introduced to their world before Jessica discovers the truth. Present-day human interaction and the ways of the immortals are woven together with imagination and suspense. Traditional religious values, exhibited by Jessica's family, add another dimension to the plot and impact on the woman's reaction when she learns the truth.
Back in 2002, Due wrote an exciting, powerful, ambitious, scary, and beautifully written supernatural sequel-thriller, The Living Blood.
Now, Jessica Jacobs-Wolde's life was destroyed when her husband, David Wolde, disappeared after killing both their daughter Kira and Jessica herself--and reviving Jessica to immortality with his healing blood. David was a Life Brother, member of an ancient, secret, and immortal African clan. Now Jessica, hiding with her surviving daughter in rural Botswana, attempts to make sense of her new existence as she uses her altered blood to save the incurably ill. But her daughter Fana was born with the living blood in her veins, and at the age of 3 can raise a storm, kill with a thought, and possess her mother's mind. The true extent of her abilities is unknown. Jessica's only hope of teaching Fana to control her dangerous talents is to travel to Ethiopia and find the Life Brothers' hidden colony. But the Life Brothers despise the new immortals and may possess the knowledge to end even immortal lives. And others [even the Roman Vatican], unknown to Jessica, are searching for her and Fana: Lucas Shepard, a Florida doctor driven to desperation by his young son's untreatable leukemia; ruthless mercenaries in the pay of an aging medical-company executive, who will stop at nothing to gain immortality and the billion-dollar profits that a drug based on the living blood would bring; and a supernatural being or force called the Bee Lady, who stalks Fana in the world of dreams, seeking to possess Fana's mind and powers for her own evil purposes.
Jessica Jacob-Wolde, a journalist who belatedly discovers that her "perfect" husband, David, is a renegade from a secretive 1,000-year-old clan of Ethiopian immortals who will kill to prevent members from sharing their life-extending blood with mortals. David has returned to Africa to do penance among his Life Brothers, and Jessica, whom he resurrected from the dead with a transfusion from himself, follows close behind, setting up a jungle clinic to dispense dilutions of her blood as medicine. Jessica's daughter Fana, whom David did not know Jessica was pregnant with when he transfused her, has begun to show magical powers, and her precocious divinity is the catalyst for a volatile brew of subplots that includes a violent schism among the Life Brothers, an alternative medicine guru's desperate efforts to save his leukemic son with Jessica's blood and a force of unspeakable evil trying to channel itself through Fana. Due exercises assured control over her wildly gyrating story, exploring its drama in terms of African culture, African-American experience and a variety of parent-child relationships. The backdrop here is the hurricane that threatens Florida at its climax.
And now, Tananarive Due has com up with
Blood Colony takes the story of Fana, who was an infant (with power that nobody matched) in
the Living Blood, and here she is coming of age. She is lonely, much as I imagine any make shift
deity would be, even though she was surrounded by her family and friends. She used her blood to cure illnesses around the world through what she and her family
call The Mission, but the US regards her blood as a narcotic, thus it's illegal. Fana and her good friend Caitlin set up a modern day underground railroad
in order to fight AIDS and other blood diseases. Glow, the street name for Fana's mystic blood, is the center of controversy and violence around the
nation. When Caitlin witnesses a horrific act of violence, she and her dad are gathered by the Immortals(Fana's family) and this causes the two girls to
run. The novel opens with an alert 17-year-old Fana fully emerged from the seemingly self-induced years-long trance finally participating in the
"world" as secluded as it may be.
Tananarive Due now imagines the story of an ancient group of immortals -- a hidden African clan that has survived for more than a thousand years -- facing one of the most challenging issues of our time: the AIDS/HIV pandemic.
The Wolde clan, along with selected friends and life brother supporters, have sequestered themselves within the Washington forest and secretly share the "living" blood with third world, remote countries under the guise of it being an experimental pharmaceutical drug. However, there is evidence that an underground distribution network exists in North America. With the blood as its catalyst, an illegal drug called Glow, is in demand with a high street value making it the target of governmental crackdowns with harsh penalties and punishments to those involved with its manufacture and distribution. It does not take long to figure out that Fana (without her parent's permission or knowledge) is the primary source of the blood that fuels Glow's production. In the span of one novel, she zooms through first crush, first kiss, to a ten-year engagement rooted in a questionable, antediluvian prophecy.
....Following the "like mother, like daughter" mantra, it is now both the Jessica and Fana's decisions that continue to endanger everyone around them while trying to save the innocent masses from disease, suffering, and death. I know that the light and goodness will prevail (or at least I hope so), but in order to pull it off, this hodgepodge family/team really needs to get it together because throughout this novel, it was more than apparent that they could barely save themselves let alone humanity. Last, buried in the pages, there is the banter and discussions from previous novels surrounding the social and philosophical arguments that continue to buoy the plot: Who does the blood really belong to? Who should benefit from it? Who decides who gets it? Should it be rationed? What is the cost of immortality? Is it really worth it? Where did it really come from?
Now
here is something not quite as absurd BUT with a little mixed-up theology!
"Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, June
13, 2008
and a horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup."
Psalms: 11:6
Walter Mosley's latest book, "The Tempest Tales", is "[d]edicated to the memory of Langston Hughes". The story, in form and content, pays homage to Jesse B Semple, the great character created by Langston Hughes in his Simple Stories. The Early Simple Stories (Collected Works of Langston Hughes) and The Later Simple Stories (Collected Works of Langston Hughes)
Set in Harlem, Tempest Landry is gunned down `accidentally' by the police for a robbery he did not commit. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the story opens we see him standing in a terminally long line, waiting for St. Peter to pass judgment. Tempest is a bit upset, to say the least, when St. Peter advises Tempest that his sins outweigh his good deeds and he is condemned to damnation. But Tempest does not go quietly. He refuses to accept the judgment and this causes no end of consternation in heaven. No soul has ever refused to accept St. Peter's judgment and Tempest soon finds out that he cannot be compelled to damnation without his consent. The rules, such as they are, require that Tempest accept the judgment that has been passed on him. St. Peter decides to send Tempest back down to earth along with a guardian angel who is is tasked with the job of convincing Tempest to accept St. Peter's judgment. Tempest (now in another soul's body) and the guardian angel end up back in Harlem. The rest of the story focuses on the relationship between Tempest and the guardian angel.
Mosley does a great job presenting Tempest as a man tasked with defending his life. St. Peter and the guardian angel live with a moral compass that it fixed, sure, and not subject to earthly claims of relative good an evil. In heavenly terms, good and bad are moral absolutes and not subject to bargaining or mitigation. But Tempest, basically on trial for his immortal soul, does a magnificent job of arguing, or trying to explain, to his angel that life on earth, particularly life for a black man in Harlem, creates enough magnetic or social `interference' to render that moral compass less than an absolute guide to sin or salvation. What Mosley does here, and to great effect, is to look at a man's life from an earthly perspective, where decisions are not nor perhaps cannot always be made in terms of absolute good and evil. Mosley manages to do this without slipping into the sort of moral relativism that makes excuses for any bad choices made by people here on earth. He does not advocate absolute relativism as a superior concept to moral precepts of right and wrong. My impress was that Mosley suggests that when we take the measure of a man's life that we look beyond a mere ledger of rights and wrongs.
"Tempest Tales" would not have worked if Mosley had not created such fine characters. Tempest, his angel and the characters that people "Tempest Tales" are painted with depth and nuance. Mosley is a fine, entertaining writer and "Tempest Tales" was yet another Mosley story that I found hard to put down. As noted earlier, "Tempest Tales" is something of homage to Langston Hughes. Its Harlem setting and the type of characters that populate the book really do evoke the wonderful stories of Hughes. Mosley, however, does not slavishly imitate Hughes the way an Elvis impersonator might don a white jump suit and do a third-rate note-by-note, gyration-by-gyration impersonation of the old Elvis. Rather, Mosley has created characters and created dialogue that are unique to Mosley and not pale imitations of Simple and his friends. That seems to me to be the best sort of homage. Highly recommended.
APOOO BookClub
26 July 2008
This author has BLOOD on the brain; and a pact with Satan:
In 1997 Tananaive Due wrote My Soul to Keep
- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Eos (April 8, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 006105366X
- ISBN-13: 978-0061053665
From the beginning, Jessica knows that David is different, but life with him seems perfect. With the birth of their daughter, life should be blissful. However, his ageless face and his perfect skin cause her investigative-reporter instincts to start questioning. Also, his lack of interest in the events of her life and work cause her to doubt the completeness of their marriage. By chance, a newspaper story Jessica writes on elder care evolves into a book proposal. Research into one of the cases leads mysteriously to David.... As the story develops, Jessica learns the truth about her husband and the choice he made so many centuries ago. David sold his soul for eternal life on Earth. He tells her he is not David, but Dawit, an immortal. Now he is offering her the same choice, against the doctrine of this secret society of believers. Readers are introduced to their world before Jessica discovers the truth. Present-day human interaction and the ways of the immortals are woven together with imagination and suspense. Traditional religious values, exhibited by Jessica's family, add another dimension to the plot and impact on the woman's reaction when she learns the truth.
Back in 2002, Due wrote an exciting, powerful, ambitious, scary, and beautifully written supernatural sequel-thriller, The Living Blood.
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- Hardcover: 528 pages
- Publisher: Atria (April 3, 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0671040839
- ISBN-13: 978-0671040833
Now, Jessica Jacobs-Wolde's life was destroyed when her husband, David Wolde, disappeared after killing both their daughter Kira and Jessica herself--and reviving Jessica to immortality with his healing blood. David was a Life Brother, member of an ancient, secret, and immortal African clan. Now Jessica, hiding with her surviving daughter in rural Botswana, attempts to make sense of her new existence as she uses her altered blood to save the incurably ill. But her daughter Fana was born with the living blood in her veins, and at the age of 3 can raise a storm, kill with a thought, and possess her mother's mind. The true extent of her abilities is unknown. Jessica's only hope of teaching Fana to control her dangerous talents is to travel to Ethiopia and find the Life Brothers' hidden colony. But the Life Brothers despise the new immortals and may possess the knowledge to end even immortal lives. And others [even the Roman Vatican], unknown to Jessica, are searching for her and Fana: Lucas Shepard, a Florida doctor driven to desperation by his young son's untreatable leukemia; ruthless mercenaries in the pay of an aging medical-company executive, who will stop at nothing to gain immortality and the billion-dollar profits that a drug based on the living blood would bring; and a supernatural being or force called the Bee Lady, who stalks Fana in the world of dreams, seeking to possess Fana's mind and powers for her own evil purposes.
Jessica Jacob-Wolde, a journalist who belatedly discovers that her "perfect" husband, David, is a renegade from a secretive 1,000-year-old clan of Ethiopian immortals who will kill to prevent members from sharing their life-extending blood with mortals. David has returned to Africa to do penance among his Life Brothers, and Jessica, whom he resurrected from the dead with a transfusion from himself, follows close behind, setting up a jungle clinic to dispense dilutions of her blood as medicine. Jessica's daughter Fana, whom David did not know Jessica was pregnant with when he transfused her, has begun to show magical powers, and her precocious divinity is the catalyst for a volatile brew of subplots that includes a violent schism among the Life Brothers, an alternative medicine guru's desperate efforts to save his leukemic son with Jessica's blood and a force of unspeakable evil trying to channel itself through Fana. Due exercises assured control over her wildly gyrating story, exploring its drama in terms of African culture, African-American experience and a variety of parent-child relationships. The backdrop here is the hurricane that threatens Florida at its climax.
And now, Tananarive Due has com up with
Blood Colony
|
Tananarive Due now imagines the story of an ancient group of immortals -- a hidden African clan that has survived for more than a thousand years -- facing one of the most challenging issues of our time: the AIDS/HIV pandemic.
There's a new drug on the street: Glow. Said to heal almost any illness, it is distributed by an Underground Railroad of drug peddlers. But what gives Glow its power? Its main ingredient is blood -- the blood of immortals. A small but powerful colony of immortals is distributing the blood, slowly wiping out the AIDS epidemic and other diseases around the world.
Meet Fana Wolde (now seventeen years old): the only immortal born with the Living Blood. She can read minds, and her injuries heal immediately. When her best friend, a mortal, is imprisoned by Fana's family, Fana helps her escape -- and together they run away from Fana's protected home in Washington State to join the Underground Railroad.
But Fana has more than her parents to worry about: Glow peddlers are being murdered by a violent, hundred-year-old sect with ties to the Vatican. Now, when Fana is most vulnerable, she is being hunted to fulfill an ancient blood prophecy that could lead to countless deaths.
While her people search for Fana and race to unravel the unknown sect's mysterious origins, Fana must learn to confront the deadly forces -- or she and everyone she loves will die.The Wolde clan, along with selected friends and life brother supporters, have sequestered themselves within the Washington forest and secretly share the "living" blood with third world, remote countries under the guise of it being an experimental pharmaceutical drug. However, there is evidence that an underground distribution network exists in North America. With the blood as its catalyst, an illegal drug called Glow, is in demand with a high street value making it the target of governmental crackdowns with harsh penalties and punishments to those involved with its manufacture and distribution. It does not take long to figure out that Fana (without her parent's permission or knowledge) is the primary source of the blood that fuels Glow's production. In the span of one novel, she zooms through first crush, first kiss, to a ten-year engagement rooted in a questionable, antediluvian prophecy.
....Following the "like mother, like daughter" mantra, it is now both the Jessica and Fana's decisions that continue to endanger everyone around them while trying to save the innocent masses from disease, suffering, and death. I know that the light and goodness will prevail (or at least I hope so), but in order to pull it off, this hodgepodge family/team really needs to get it together because throughout this novel, it was more than apparent that they could barely save themselves let alone humanity. Last, buried in the pages, there is the banter and discussions from previous novels surrounding the social and philosophical arguments that continue to buoy the plot: Who does the blood really belong to? Who should benefit from it? Who decides who gets it? Should it be rationed? What is the cost of immortality? Is it really worth it? Where did it really come from?
- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: Atria; 1st Atria Books Hardcover Ed edition (June 3, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743287355
- ISBN-13: 978-0743287357
Now
here is something not quite as absurd BUT with a little mixed-up theology!
"Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, | By | Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
  |
Psalms: 11:6
Walter Mosley's latest book, "The Tempest Tales", is "[d]edicated to the memory of Langston Hughes". The story, in form and content, pays homage to Jesse B Semple, the great character created by Langston Hughes in his Simple Stories. The Early Simple Stories (Collected Works of Langston Hughes) and The Later Simple Stories (Collected Works of Langston Hughes)
Set in Harlem, Tempest Landry is gunned down `accidentally' by the police for a robbery he did not commit. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the story opens we see him standing in a terminally long line, waiting for St. Peter to pass judgment. Tempest is a bit upset, to say the least, when St. Peter advises Tempest that his sins outweigh his good deeds and he is condemned to damnation. But Tempest does not go quietly. He refuses to accept the judgment and this causes no end of consternation in heaven. No soul has ever refused to accept St. Peter's judgment and Tempest soon finds out that he cannot be compelled to damnation without his consent. The rules, such as they are, require that Tempest accept the judgment that has been passed on him. St. Peter decides to send Tempest back down to earth along with a guardian angel who is is tasked with the job of convincing Tempest to accept St. Peter's judgment. Tempest (now in another soul's body) and the guardian angel end up back in Harlem. The rest of the story focuses on the relationship between Tempest and the guardian angel.
Mosley does a great job presenting Tempest as a man tasked with defending his life. St. Peter and the guardian angel live with a moral compass that it fixed, sure, and not subject to earthly claims of relative good an evil. In heavenly terms, good and bad are moral absolutes and not subject to bargaining or mitigation. But Tempest, basically on trial for his immortal soul, does a magnificent job of arguing, or trying to explain, to his angel that life on earth, particularly life for a black man in Harlem, creates enough magnetic or social `interference' to render that moral compass less than an absolute guide to sin or salvation. What Mosley does here, and to great effect, is to look at a man's life from an earthly perspective, where decisions are not nor perhaps cannot always be made in terms of absolute good and evil. Mosley manages to do this without slipping into the sort of moral relativism that makes excuses for any bad choices made by people here on earth. He does not advocate absolute relativism as a superior concept to moral precepts of right and wrong. My impress was that Mosley suggests that when we take the measure of a man's life that we look beyond a mere ledger of rights and wrongs.
"Tempest Tales" would not have worked if Mosley had not created such fine characters. Tempest, his angel and the characters that people "Tempest Tales" are painted with depth and nuance. Mosley is a fine, entertaining writer and "Tempest Tales" was yet another Mosley story that I found hard to put down. As noted earlier, "Tempest Tales" is something of homage to Langston Hughes. Its Harlem setting and the type of characters that populate the book really do evoke the wonderful stories of Hughes. Mosley, however, does not slavishly imitate Hughes the way an Elvis impersonator might don a white jump suit and do a third-rate note-by-note, gyration-by-gyration impersonation of the old Elvis. Rather, Mosley has created characters and created dialogue that are unique to Mosley and not pale imitations of Simple and his friends. That seems to me to be the best sort of homage. Highly recommended.
- Hardcover: 190 pages
- Publisher: Black Classic Press (May 7, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1574780433
- ISBN-13: 978-1574780437
From Publishers Weekly
Mosley, best known for his gritty Easy Rawlins mysteries, explores cosmic questions of justice and redemption in this odd tale of Tempest Landry, a black man shot dead by police when they thought he was pulling a gun. Landry throws the afterlife into turmoil by refusing to accept St. Peter's judgment that he must spend eternity in Hell. Three years after his death, Landry is returned to Manhattan, with a new face and an angel named Joshua to watch over him. As Landry sets up one morally complex situation after another, Joshua engages him in discussions of situational ethics, trying to get Landry to accept that he is a sinner and deserves damnation. Eventually, Landry recruits Satan himself in his cause. The interesting concept is not matched by its execution, but some readers may find Landry a humorous creation and appreciate his eventual solution to his dilemma. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Mosley, best known for his gritty Easy Rawlins mysteries, explores cosmic questions of justice and redemption in this odd tale of Tempest Landry, a black man shot dead by police when they thought he was pulling a gun. Landry throws the afterlife into turmoil by refusing to accept St. Peter's judgment that he must spend eternity in Hell. Three years after his death, Landry is returned to Manhattan, with a new face and an angel named Joshua to watch over him. As Landry sets up one morally complex situation after another, Joshua engages him in discussions of situational ethics, trying to get Landry to accept that he is a sinner and deserves damnation. Eventually, Landry recruits Satan himself in his cause. The interesting concept is not matched by its execution, but some readers may find Landry a humorous creation and appreciate his eventual solution to his dilemma. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Tempest Landry, an everyman African American, is "accidentally" killed by a cop. Denied access to heaven because of what he considers a few minor
transgressions, Tempest refuses to go to hell. Stymied, Saint Peter sends him back to Harlem, where a guiding angel tries to convince him to accept Saint
Peter's judgment, and even the Devil himself tries to win over Tempest's soul. Through the street-smart Landry, Mosley poses the provocative
question: Is sin for blacks the same as it is for whites? And who gets to decide?
