Thoughts on...Yellow Moon by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Come, feel the rhythm of New Orleans!

Yellow Moon deals with Voodoo, death, destruction and a little sex. When else do you feel completely alive but during sex? Actually, there are only a couple sex scenes so you can easily skip them ;)

As for the other.....this is a horror book. Maybe not as scary as some, but still the blood and the mystical are strong parts of the story.

Live life large. Let the good times roll. New Orleans-her adopted home. The city where she felt most herself.

The song ended. Climaxing in a vibrato that left the audience breathless, whistling, stomping their feet, demanding more.

Marie Levant. ER Doctor. Descendant of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. Practitioner of Voodoo herself, her second home is the ER. She uses both her learned science and inherited sight to heal. Always, to heal.

When there is a strange murder, a detective arrives at the ER with a body.

"They said you were the right doctor for a weird death."

......The body wasn't much more than a skeleton, brown fresh stretched over bone. Lying on the gurney-bones stiff, skin deflated-the body seemed a cruel joke. A Paper-mache or woodcut of a body. A made thing, not a dead man.

The book isn't all blood and gore, there are several touching scenes with patients in the ER.

I don't normally read a series out of order. However, I was asked to review Yellow Moon and it is book two of a trilogy. Exciting? Yes. Complete on it's own? Yes. I didn't feel like I was missing anything. I love the dog's name and am wondering if it is explained in book one but other than wanting to know what came before and what comes next, Yellow Moon is a satisfying read all on it's own.

You might want to read this one during the daylight :D

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary review copy of this book without any obligation to write a positive review. The opinions expressed in this post are mine and may differ from yours. Book information courtesy of Simon & Schuster



Yellow Moon
by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Washington Square Press
ISBN: 1-4165-3711-2
Trade paperback
August 2009
horror
18+
304 pages


Product Description:

A jazzman, a wharf worker, a prostitute, all murdered. Wrists punctured, their bodies impossibly drained of blood. What connects them? Why are they rising as ghosts?

Marie Levant, the great-great granddaughter of the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau, knows better than anyone New Orleans's brutal past -- the legacy of slavery, poverty, racism, and sexism -- and as a doctor at Charity Hospital's ER, she treats its current victims.

When she sleeps, she dreams of blood. Rain, never ending. The river is rising and the yellow moon warns of an ancient evil -- an African vampire -- wazimamoto -- a spirit created by colonial oppression.

The struggle becomes personal, as the wazimamoto is intent on destroying her and all the Laveau descendants. Marie fights to protect her daughter, lover, and herself from the wazimamoto's seductive assault on both body and spirit.

Echoing with the heartache and triumph of the African-American experience, the soulful rhythms of jazz, and the horrors of racial oppression, Yellow Moon gives us an unforgettable heroine -- sexy, vulnerable, and mysterious -- in Marie Levant, while it powerfully evokes a city on the brink of catastrophe.

Yellow Moon is part two of the New Orleans trilogy that began with Voodoo Season -- magical realist fiction that takes the legend of the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, as imagined by Jewell Parker Rhodes in the bestselling Voodoo Dreams, into the present day.

I guess if you were extra sensitive to the "heartache and triumph of the African-American experience" you would see it in the book. I saw heartache and triumph and noticed the talk of slavery but, I'm sorry, I didn't see it as just the African-American experience. I saw it as a human experience.

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