My Soul to Keep is already underway as a film, and probably as a series. Clearly Due plans a third volume, focused most...
Due follows The Black Rose (2000), a novel written from Alex Haley's posthumous notes, with this sequel to her gripping My Soul to Keep (1997).
Miami reporter Jessica Jacobs, married to David Wolde for six years, doesn't know that he's actually over 500 years old, having fathered many families and watched them die. David belongs to The Immortals, ruled by Khaldun, who since drinking the blood of Christ has gathered The Immortals about him by transfusing his blood into theirs. Only David knows Khaldun's secret ritual, which must accompany such a transfusion to promote not just relief from all illnesses but immortality as well. David disappears, shot dead by the police, but then rises from the Miami morgue and goes his way, leaving Jessica, whom he's made immortal, and their three-year-old daughter Beatrice behind. Beatrice has fantastic gifts. After drowning in a bathtub, she too rises from the dead, reborn as Fana at the behest of Khaldun, with whom she has a telepathic tie. At the same time, Jessica and her physician sister Alexis have gone to South Africa to set up a clinic where a serum made from Jessica's blood cures terminal illnesses among many children. Then the sisters try to hide out in Botswana. But their new clinic also becomes swamped. Meanwhile, a black market arises in the famous blood drawn from children Jessica cured. And Khaldun and The Immortals oppose Jessica's meddling with immortality. Will Jessica persuade The Immortals that The Living Blood can be used for the greater good of mankind? Will David return and help her?
My Soul to Keep is already underway as a film, and probably as a series. Clearly Due plans a third volume, focused most likely on Fana. This installment is enriched by its large cast of appealing characters tied by blood, and by its author's abiding humanity.Pub Date: April 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-04083-9
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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