The Printed Page

Title: Voodoo Season
Author/website(s): Jewell Parker Rhodes
273 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication date: July ’06
Genre: Fiction
Review book or pleasure reading: Pleasure reading
New-to-me author: Yes
Would I recommend this book: Only if this subject/topic interests you
Would I read more from this author: I might depending on the subject/topic
Journal notes: Pleasure reading – no review.

Medicine and voodoo may seem at odds, but Marie Levant, first-year resident at New Orleans’s Charity Hospital, discovers she has a gift for more than one kind of healing. Rhodes develops this theme to full advantage in her second book (after Voodoo Dreams) about this descendant of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen. Strange forces are at work in the humid heat, and Marie is plagued by disturbing dreams and the sense that she has lived this life before. She employs her inner strength and feminist powers in pursuit of the murderer of the gentle and handsome young man who shared her bed one evening, awakening feelings she had too long ignored. Marie’s mother fled to Chicago when she was small and cleaned houses to survive. When the mother died mysteriously, the daughter went into foster care. Events intensify with Marie’s delivery of a dead girl’s living baby. She feels herself the mother and resolves to find the baby’s origins.

Title: Yellow Moon
Author/website(s): Jewell Parker Rhodes
293 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication date: August ’09
Genre: Fiction
Review book or pleasure reading: Review book
New-to-me author: No
Would I recommend this book: Only if this subject/topic interests you; I actually DNF’d Yellow Moon @ pg. 102
Would I read more from this author: I might depending on the subject/topic
Journal notes: This is one of the review books I accepted last year. It was a book I was very much on the fence about accepting but the story line sounded intriguing enough for me to say yes. And a good lesson for me about why I’m limiting the genre of books reviewed in 2010. This is 2nd book in a trilogy which consequently means I needed to read book #1 (Voodoo Season) before starting Yellow Moon. Both Voodoo Season and Yellow Moon are well written stories that simply don’t appeal to me. I’d say if you have a strong interest in this subject/topic you would probably enjoy these two books. These books have some faction to their story lines as they make reference to Marie Laveau, a renowned practitioner of voudou in New Orleans. Usually when I DNF a book and/or author I simply won’t read anymore from them. Not so for Ms. Rhodes. Her historical novel Douglass’ Women holds great appeal for me and I hope to be able to read it this year.

In Rhodes’s superb sequel to 2006′s Voodoo Season, a wazimamoto, or African vampire, stalks Dr. Marie Laveau, a 21st-century doctor, modern voodoo practitioner and descendant of the legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Haunted by the unquiet spirits of people killed by the wazimamoto, the young doctor vows to stop it with the help of new boyfriend NOPD Det. Daniel Parks; her Creole boss, Dr. Louis DuLac; and others devoted to Marie and her young adopted daughter, Marie-Claire. As the blood of the victims nourishes the vampire so it can completely assume human form, Marie must summon all her powers to vanquish it.

(Yellow Moon was provided to me by Karen @ Anita Halton Associates. I was not paid and this book is being passed along to the another book blogger through Read It Forward or being donated to my local library )