Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery [Hardcover]

Jewell Parker Rhodes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2005

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Atria (August 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743483278
• ISBN-13: 978-0743483278
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,609,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

http://www.jewellparkerrhodes.com
http://www.jewellparkerrhodes.com/children/

Jewell Parker Rhodes is the award-winning author of the historical novels, Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass' Women, and the contemporary voodoo-inspired trilogy, Season, Moon, Hurricane. She has also written a memoir, Porch Stories: A Grandmother's Guide to Happiness, two writing guides include: Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction, and the children's novel, Ninth Ward.

Her work has been published in Germany, Italy, Canada, Turkey, and the United Kingdom and reproduced in audio and for NPR's "Selected Shorts." Her literary awards include: the American Book Award, the National Endowment of the Arts Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Award for Literary Excellence, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Outstanding Writing, and two Arizona Book Awards. Ninth Ward, selected as one of the "Best Books of 2010" by School Library Journal, has received a Parents' Choice Foundation Gold Award, the Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, and the 2011 Jane Addams Peace Association Honor Award.

Dr. Jewell Parker Rhodes is the Artistic Director for Global Engagement and the Piper Endowed Chair of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual Awakening..., August 22, 2005

By 

Phyllis Rhodes (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery (Hardcover)

There is a legend that the infamous New Orleans native and Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau never died, that, in fact, her spirit lives on in selected female descendents, each a namesake, and Laveau's faithful are awaiting her return. Jewell Parker Rhodes (Voodoo Dreams, Douglass's Women, Magic City) births a modern day Marie in the second book of the Marie Laveau/Voodoo trilogy, Voodoo Season: a Marie Laveau Mystery.

The novel centers on first year medical resident, Marie Levant, a cum laude graduate from the school of hard knocks. As a child living in Chicago, she discovered her mother's lifeless body on the kitchen floor and was whisked away only to be abused in the foster care system. She defies the odds by excelling academically and winning scholarships to medical school, which she views as a natural progression to her inherent life-long healing abilities. She is an animal lover, empathetic to her patients, and acts rather impulsively on her rather sensuous nature. The novel opens with her relocating to New Orleans, after being drawn there by unknown forces. She battles disturbing dreams that contain vivid images of ritual ceremonies, childbirth, and a woman being persecuted. The tale is largely told from Levant's perspective and uses flashbacks/memories to show her immediate past as a forlorn child and haunting dreams to reveal her spiritual past as Laveau, the Voodoo Queen. As you can guess, Levant is the chosen one, and it seems everyone knows it but her.

Rhodes sprinkles elements of suspense and foreboding in lines such as, "Summer. Sin season. Fever season. Anything could happen. Even the undead," and emphasizes Levant's confusion and struggles as she comes into her "season" or her reckoning with her destiny. She initially rejects her increasing power of healing, insight and intuition and balks at the awareness of herself as a Marie Laveau reincarnate; a powerful Voodooienne. However, along the way, she begrudgingly embraces her fate as she discovers painful family secrets and the truth behind her mother's death and its eerie similarity with the murders of the young, unclaimed girls who keep showing up in her wake.

Although not a strong mystery (more so filled with anticipation), the book does a wonderful job clarifying and dispelling misconceptions about the Vodun religion and the origin of Voodoo as the merging of African beliefs and Christianity. One character explains, "Religions from the African Diaspora all value the snake as knowledge, all-knowing, an infinity and fertility symbol. White Christians bemoan that a snake tempted Eve in the Garden. But in voodoo, the same myth is a cause for celebration. Snakes represent knowledge. `Knowing is what keeps you safe, strong.' What good is Eden with ignorance?" Going a step further, she parallels spiritual icons. In one example, Legba is akin to St. Peter and serves as a gatekeeper.

Rhodes masterfully blends in the historical decadence of the New Orleans of old - the true purpose of the Quadroon Balls with hints of the La Placage lifestyle, lessons on racism/colorism (New Orleans style), complete with beguiling glimpses into another world complete with ghosts, zombies, spirit gods, and ritual sacrifices.

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
Nubian Circle Book Club

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fast-paced exciting supernatural mystery, August 26, 2005

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery (Hardcover)

Marie Levant relocates from Chicago to begin a medial residency at the New Orleans' Charity Hospital. However, upon returning to the hometown of her ancestors, Marie begins to have strange violent dreams about her heritage. That is followed by ritual serial killings that force Marie to look into her past as the direct descendent of Voodoo Priestess Marie Laveau and two subsequent Maries who were bathed in blood.

Marie learns that young females are being abducted to serve as prostitutes at reenactment galas of nineteenth century quadroon balls; the unfortunate innocents are used and abused before being converted into slave zombies. New Orleans Police Detective Reneaux struggles to save the girls and uncover the monster behind this hideous practice, but only Marie by claiming her heritage can hope to stop the evil that engulfs the young of the city.

VOODOO SEASON is a terrific paranormal police procedural that will make believers of readers that there are strange unexplained essences and inexplicable powers out there. The story line is action-packed as Marie slowly accepts her ancestry "gifts" while Reneaux struggles with a nasty case and how Marie fits in the middle of the maelstrom. Fans of fast-paced exciting supernatural mysteries will want to read this jewel of a thriller.

Harriet Klausner

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't follow the author, March 21, 2006

By 

R. Bradley "rmb1026" (Lisle, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery (Hardcover)

I have read different fictional books on the topic of Voodoo and thought this one was going to be especially good as one of my favorite authors, Tananarive Due, gave a review on it. I was disappointed however. I think throughout the book the author might assume you are following right with her but I was lost and felt she was leaving information out. I was drawn in for maybe the first half but then she lost me. Overall I think the story had potential but it's unlikely I'll read this author again.