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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Historically Haunting!, October 4, 2005
This review is from: Joplin's Ghost: A Novel (Hardcover)
No one will know me until fifty years after I'm dead," Scott said. ~ Excerpt from Joplin's Ghost
Tananarive Due's latest release, Joplin's Ghost, exemplifies the restless and wandering spirit of musical genius Scott Joplin. The title says it all; however, this is more than just your typical ghost story. Due combines speculative and historical fiction with a splash of romance and urban drama to produce a great story - period. Joplin's Ghost centers on a young, eclectic, emerging Rhythm & Blues female musician, Phoenix Smalls, managed by an overprotective father and a flashy, high-profile, mega-record producer boyfriend. As a child, Phoenix suffered through an eerie accident involving a piano which led to months of agonizing rehabilitation. Shortly thereafter, a foreboding sleepwalking episode finds a ten-year-old Phoenix playing highly complex ragtime scores - years beyond her training. Nearly a decade later, as her star begins to shine, she somehow channels Joplin's ghost and composes what appears to be scores from his lost opera, A Guest of Honor, inspired by Booker T. Washington's visit to the White House. Phoenix avidly researches Joplin's life and discovers many uncanny parallels to her own, including a belief that she may be the reincarnation of his wife, Freddy.
The Ghost is relentless; the possessions rise in intensity to the point of near-death experiences. It is during her dreams that Phoenix is transported to Joplin's world, late 19th century Missouri. Here Phoenix learns that Joplin was hailed the "Ragtime King," and at one time celebrated as one of the most sophisticated and tasteful ragtime composers of the era, having unprecedented success with "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899, and "The Entertainer" in 1902. He passionately pursued his great aspirations. Scott Joplin's only surviving opera, "Treemonisha" unfolds the proud story of an educated daughter of former slaves who rises to greatness in the post-bellum 1800s. Unfortunately, true greatness eluded Joplin; Treemonisha failed and bankrupted him shortly after its shaky start. The world was not ready to receive such a progressive tale, leaving the soft-spoken musical genius trapped and victimized by the social ignorance and racial politics of the era. At times, it seems like Joplin is foredoomed because the opera's failure was not Joplin's only exposure to bad luck, but also because it seemed to plague him all his life: his daughter died in infancy, his first wife abandoned him; his closest brother died prematurely, and his beloved second wife (Freddy) died after only 10 weeks of marriage. Joplin is portrayed as frustrated, yet still driven; as he suffers a prolonged and agonizing death from tertiary syphilis at age 49, tragically dying heirless and penniless in obscurity in a New York mental ward a few days before the outbreak of World War I.
Due is ingenious in that she fuses Treemonisha's message of courage, education, and self-motivation into Phoenix's modern day music to reach and teach today's youth about social responsibility and history. The duality of the novel is that it serves as a wonderfully imagined work on the trials and tribulations of Joplin; and through Phoenix's ordeals with Joplin and other leading characters, Due subtlety mirrors and demonstrates the ill effects of record label rivalry and the misogynistic, sexual, and violent lyrics commonplace in today's Hip Hop music. Phoenix and Joplin's bedeviled journey is weird and intense, evolving into a life-altering experience for both beings as Phoenix hurries to free herself and Joplin from their cursed bond.
No one knows for sure if Joplin ever stated the prophetic opening quote, but if he did, he was off by only a couple of decades. "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer," featured in the 1974 film "The Sting", earned two Academy Awards for its musical score; and Treemonisha was adapted for a Broadway presentation in 1975, which earned Joplin a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
Nubian Circle Book Club
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent writing...Excellent Story, October 5, 2005
This review is from: Joplin's Ghost: A Novel (Hardcover)
I have been a fan of Tananarive Due and her husband, Stephen Barnes from the very beginning of their writing careers. In Ms. Due's current book, JOPLIN'S GHOST, she does another masterful job of making the supernatural seem plausible and leaves readers wondering if those bumps in the night are really "just" their imagination.
Phoenix is an incredible character. She is strong yet vulnerable and through her eyes, we get to see Scott Joplin in all of his perfections and his flaws. Scott Joplin dies of syphillus and the way Ms. Due weaves in reality with "unreality" one is left in the uncomfortable position of trying to figure out what reality truly is.
There is a line where Mr. Joplin asks Freddie/Phoenix is she really there and if he is mad. She tells him yes he is mad and yes she is there. To me, that line challenges the age-old question of what is real and what isn't. Is reality what exists in each individuals mind or is it something that must be shared collectively.
I'm not sure if those answers are given, or even if they need to be, but I will say this book is one of my favorites of Ms. Dues. Her writing only gets better and better with time.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The ghost of Scott Joplin, a haunted piano, and a channeling rock star., October 1, 2005
This review is from: Joplin's Ghost: A Novel (Hardcover)
Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for The Between, and recipient of the 2002 American Book Award for another horror novel, The Living Blood, Tananarive Due is an accomplished juggler of the real and supernatural, able to weave a spell which makes readers willingly suspend their disbelief. Here Due adds historical elements to the supernatural, telling the tale of a young R&B singer, who finds herself irrevocably tied to rag-time composer/pianist Joplin and his ghost.
Seriously injured by Joplin's ancient piano, which mysteriously fell on her when she was ten, Phoenix Small, at twenty, is on the verge of a major music career when she suddenly starts seeing and hearing Joplin's ghost--a man in her apartment, a voice calling to her, and Joplin's music appearing in her own computer music program. She gives piano concerts of Joplin's lost music while asleep and believes that "Joplin was the only person who could teach her what she needed to know."
Due gracefully alternates Joplin's sad, turn-of-the-century biography with Phoenix's present music world, a time of gangsta rap and rock, showing the efforts of black musicians in both periods to give voice to the black experience. Due is particularly sensitive in evoking the life of Joplin, beginning the novel with a wrenching account of his final days as a crippled and mentally disturbed syphilitic at Bellevue. Her ability to pack her descriptions with lively sense impressions brings the music world alive in both periods, and the characters, even the minor ones, live and breathe, adding to the the supernatural suspense. Love stories for both Joplin and Phoenix, unabashedly sexual, reveal their passion for life and the ability of love to color their music.
As Phoenix mysteriously channels more and more of Joplin's lost music, including his first opera, believed to have been burned, she finds it dominating her own music and her career, and as Joplin's love story takes tragic turns, Phoenix, too, finds her own love story and her family life becoming dramatically affected. Joplin's piano, the one item which connects the real world of Joplin with that of Phoenix, takes on a life of its own, and as the tension builds to a dramatic confrontation between Phoenix and her ghost, the piano plays a key role.
Filled with fascinating historical detail about the life and times of Scott Joplin, from the turn of the century until Joplin's death in 1917, this exciting, sure-to-be-popular novel finely captures the status of black music at two different periods. Despite its excessive description, which would have benefited from pruning, the novel is fun to read-- "soft horror," rather than a blood-and-gore extravaganza. n Mary Whipple
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