Product Description

Voodoo Season revisits the mystical landscape of New Orleans -- and its most famous Voodoo priestess, Marie Laveau -- that Jewell Parker Rhodes introduced us to in her previous novel Voodoo Dreams. This time, the award-winning author of historical fiction sets the story in the here and now.

Meet Marie Levant. The great-great granddaughter of the beloved, tantalizing Marie Laveau, she is compelled by unseen forces to leave her medical career in Chicago behind and return to her roots. But once she arrives in New Orleans, Marie is both seduced and horrified by this mysterious landscape whose slave-holding past merges with the spoils of the twenty-first century. A place where the Quadroon Balls of yesterday are a present reality, and women of color are still being abused and -- even more horrifying -- rendered "undead." Yet through it all, Marie can't help but sense that she's lived here before . . . and that maybe there's more to this city's history -- and her own.

With Voodoo Season, Rhodes once again presents her legions of fans with a heroine of authentic power and an alluring, unforgettable read.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #387251 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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. Rhodes's tale of spiritual empowerment and prophetic vision reveals the practice of voodoo as good as well as evil. Nonbelievers along with the initiated will be riveted throughout.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Rhodes portrayed the revered and feared nineteenth-century New Orleans voodoo queens, Marie Laveau and her daughter of the same name, with insight and lyricism in her debut novel, Voodoo Dreams (1993). Here she launches a mystery trilogy about the voodoo queens' present-day descendant. Orphaned as a girl in Chicago, this Marie is unaware of her spiritual inheritance. All she knows is that she felt compelled to become a doctor and move to New Orleans. Now, as she puzzles over what happened to the beautiful young women of mixed race who are showing up in the ER apparently dead and certainly pregnant, she is assailed by frightening, otherworldly visions. Rhodes revels in the sensuality and danger of this storied town in an erotic, easily consumed tale as her plucky would-be doctor turns voodoo sleuth attuned to gods, ghosts, and villains. Regrettably, Rhodes verges on voodoo-lite in scenes redolent of campy Hollywood; nevertheless, Marie's world of sex, malevolence, the undead, and miraculous rescue is alluring. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A spellbinding read based on the story of the legendary New Orleans high priestess."-- Essence

"Rhodes' tale of spiritual empowerment and prophetic vision reveals the practice of voodoo as good as well as evil. Nonbelievers along with the initiated will be riveted throughout."-- Publishers Weekly

"[The book's] world of sex, malevolence, the undead, and miraculous rescue is alluring."-- Booklist

"[A] literate page-turner . . . compelling and elegantly written."-- Tananarive Due, author of Joplin's Ghost

Customer Reviews

Stink, Stank, Stunk!
The author has been watching too much of the Blues Brothers movie where they go to Louisiana to compete in a band competition and meet the "Voodoo Queen". The conversations between the characters are choppy and unreadable. The story line in the hospital in ridiculous, with the hospital administrator being a drunk, the nurses being loony and the ONE police figure being unstrung. The ending is so comical, Blues Brother funny and unbelievable that you aren't surprised when she just ....STOPS the book with no plausible ending, leaving all characters, including the dog - just hanging. Please lady --- come back to the real world. If this is what the creole culture in New Orleans is really about it's a good thing they are rebuilding. Look elsewhere to spend $15.00.

Loved It
I've read Voodoo Dreams and fell in love witht this author and she is becoming one of my favorites well my favorite at the moment because I seem interested only in the topics she writes on. :) I really enjoyed this book I couldn't put it down, up late nights and on the train every day deeply into the lives of those in this book. A great read.

Satisfied!
This book is a great continuation from her first one, Voodoo Dreams. It is also a very easy read. It only took my 4 days to finish it. I think that anyone would enjoy this book and I can't wait until she publishes Voodoo Jazz!!!! :)