FICTION
Released: May 10, 2011
"Vampy romp best appreciated by existing fans of the West End series."
Five sexy vampires show up in Atlanta, causing considerable consternation for local godfather Blue Hamilton and his wife Regina.Led by the otherwordly Serena Mayflower, the "Too Fine Five" have a reputation that precedes them.
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FICTION
Released: April 20, 2010
"Refusing to challenge her characters, Cleage (Seen It All and Done the Rest, 2008, etc.) undermines an exciting premise."
FICTION
Released: March 18, 2008
"Good intentions, good politics and a spirited heroine can't salvage the paint-by-numbers plot. "
FICTION
Released: July 10, 2007
Introducing Tennyson Hardwick, who is black, beautiful and--if you ask the LAPD--bad as they come.
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FICTION
Released: April 1, 2006
"An unconvincing mishmash of violence, spiritual uplift and Hallmark romance."
Cleage returns to the idealized African-American world of
Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (2003), this time combining romance with a noirish criminal melodrama.
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FICTION
Released: Oct. 1, 2005
"A finely crafted character study, a parable about race and an exciting family saga. Exquisitely moving fiction."
A little girl suffering from amnesia wakes to find that she's actually a middle-aged vampire, in this suspenseful novel from Butler, her first in seven years.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 2, 2003
"Spread the good juju. Due weaves a stronger net than ever."
Due returns to the supernatural fiction she mines so well in the series begun with
My Soul to Keep (1997) and
The Living Blood (2001), though her latest falls outside that series.
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NONFICTION
Released: Jan. 1, 2003
"Occasionally disjointed, but readers will quite likely be both charmed and educated by these dedicated, candid, brilliant women."
Two generations of civil-rights insights from an activist in her 60s and her daughter, a newspaper reporter turned novelist (
The Living Blood, 2001, etc.).
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FICTION
Released: July 3, 2001
"More a bully pulpit than a novel."
An Oprah Book Club author (also see Mitchard, below) returns with a relentlessly on-message companion novel to
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997), this one featuring Ava's older sister Joyce, a strong woman who finally finds a man who's good enough.
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FICTION
Released: April 10, 2001
"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."
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).
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FICTION
Released: Oct. 3, 1995
"Splendid pieces, set forth in calm, lucid prose with never a word wasted."
Essentially a novelist, Butler (Parable of the Sower, 1994, etc.) confesses that she finds short fiction arduous and frustrating.
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FICTION
Released: Dec. 8, 1993
"A vanishingly thin plot and dreadfully preachy: imperfections for which Butler's usual virtues—lucid prose, a realistic progression of events, and splendid texture—unfortunately fail to compensate."
Diary of teenager Lauren Olamina, 2024-27, as she struggles to survive the collapse of civilization and formulate a new religion that spells out her notion of God as change: from the author of Clay's Ark, the Xenogenesis series, etc. Only walled enclaves like Robledo, California, stand against total descent into barbarism, criminality, and madness; even so, one by one the enclaves are being overrun by drug-crazed ``Paints.'' Olamina's younger brother Keith, tiring of his father's strictures and determined to make a life for himself outside, runs away, to live by robbery, murder, and drug-dealing—and quickly ends up horribly dead.
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