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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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