Vodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery.Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery by Jewell Parker Rhodes Jewell Parker Rhodes (b.1954 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American novelist. Rhodes is professor of Creative Writing and American Literature and former Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Atria Atria The heart has four chambers. The right and left atria are at the top of the heart and receive returning blood from the veins. The right and left ventricles are at the bottom of the heart and act as the body's main pumps. Books, August 2005 $24, ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-743-48327-8 To believe in voodoo requires a suspension of disbelief--to accept the unacceptable and embrace the impossible. This is the dilemma faced by Marie Levant Levant (ləvănt`) [Ital.,=east], collective name for the countries of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from Egypt to, and including, Turkey. , the otherwise rational heroine of Voodoo Season. At the beginning of Rhodes's fourth novel, Marie has moved from Chicago to New Orleans, where she works as a medical resident at a rundown charity hospital. Lack of funds and an alcoholic supervisor force Marie to take on more responsibility on the job. She is a brilliant, intuitive doctor-in-training who rises to the occasion. However, the purpose and order she finds inside the hospital's walls eludes her in her personal life. Marie is lonely, confused and plagued by dreams and visions of three Marie Laveaus, including the 19-century voodoo priestess from whom she is descended and with whom she shares a powerful and mysterious connection. During one shift, Marie delivers a baby from the body of a dead woman, the first in a series of young people who succumb to seemingly nonviolent deaths and are found with mysterious markings on their foreheads. Marie's supervisor, who believes she has the gift to see things, pairs her with a detective to crack the case. Along the way, they uncover a dark voodoo underworld, and Marie is forced to come to terms with her "gift" and the truth about her ancestors. Voodoo Season treads the line between the reality of modern hospitals and the fantastical elements of voodoo with skill and confidence, weaving details and deft prose. Readers who believe in the power of voodoo or are willing to suspend their own disbelief will be rewarded with an engrossing engrossing, in English law, practice of acquiring a monopoly of goods in order to sell them at an inflated price. The offense was ordinarily limited to monopolies of foods. Related practices were forestalling, i.e. , intense read. --Reviewed by Melissa Ewey Johnson Melissa Ewey Johnson is a writer and editor in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. . |
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