My Soul to Keep

Tananarive Due is intrigued by how unfolding timelines and alternate destinies impinge on people's lives. "How frightening it is," she writes, "when fate is at liberty to take over what will has begun." As in her absorbing first novel, The Between , My Soul to Keep is about what happens when the domestic joy of a middle-class African American family (in this story, he's a jazz scholar, she's a reporter, and they have a 5-year-old daughter) is shattered by supernatural forces and memories of events long past. The story is deeply involving because of the characters' appeal, and suspenseful because the loving husband (who turns out to be a 500-year-old immortal) is so alien, he's utterly unpredictable. The passages recalling the husband's experiences as a slave in the American South in the 1800s are especially gripping. It's a melodramatic approach to dark fantasy, but it works well. From School Library Journal YA?From the beginning, Jessica knows that David is different, but life with him seems perfect. With the birth of their daughter, life should be blissful. However, his ageless face and his perfect skin cause her investigative-reporter instincts to start questioning. Also, his lack of interest in the events of her life and work cause her to doubt the completeness of their marriage. By chance, a newspaper story Jessica writes on elder care evolves into a book proposal. Research into one of the cases leads mysteriously to David?her David. As the story develops, Jessica learns the truth about her husband and the choice he made so many centuries ago. David sold his soul for eternal life on Earth. He tells her he is not David, but Dawit, an immortal. Now he is offering her the same choice, against the doctrine of this secret society of believers. Readers are introduced to their world before Jessica discovers the truth. Present-day human interaction and the ways of the immortals are woven together with imagination and suspense. Traditional religious values, exhibited by Jessica's family, add another dimension to the plot and impact on the woman's reaction when she learns the truth. Those familiar with Anne Rice's novels will be instantly drawn into the world of Dawit and the society created by the immortals.?Beth Devers, Elmhurst Public Library, ILCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Due's second novel is more compelling than her first, The Between (1995). In the spirit of Octavia Butler's novel, Kindred , the supernatural elements are rooted in an African and African American heritage and culture. Dawit's story spans 400 years and several countries. Yet, it is his current life, with wife Jessica and daughter Kira, that he wants to hold on to forever. His lives as a warrior, slave, jazz musician, teacher, husband, and father have all ended amid sorrow and extreme human conditions. He seeks to balance his mortality and immortality, yet with each mortal experience his perceptions of life are more human than wizardly. He is summoned to return to the house of his Life Blood brothers. This order, complicated by his love for his family, causes him to disobey and jeopardize the existence of the brotherhood. Due has written an incredible story about eternal life and succeeds in inducing the reader to suspend disbelief until the very end of the book. Lillian Lewis From Kirkus Reviews Top-flight soft-horror novel by Miami-based columnist Due (The Between, 1995). Some 500 years ago, young Dawit of Lalibela, in Abyssinia, was inducted into the 52-member group called The Immortals by the master Khaldun, who had drunk the blood of Christ. Still looking 30, Dawit (now known as David) lives in Miami, his Khaldun-transfused blood so filled with T-cells that no disease or injury can kill him. He is, for all practical purposes, immortal. He's had many careers. He's also had many lovers, wives, and children, and watched age overtake them while he remained young. Today, his daughter Rosalie, from a liaison in New Orleans in the 1920s, lies infirm in a Chicago nursing home. David stops off to administer euthanasia. Then he returns to Jessica, his wife of six years, a Miami reporter who's just started research on a book about disgraceful conditions in nursing homes. The Immortals think themselves above humans, so when David feels threatened by Jessica's research he kills her fellow researcher, Peter. Although he's killed before to protect his identity, his love of Jessica makes him feel, for the first time, guilty for what he's done. David realizes that he doesn't, for once, want to outlive and, to protect his secret, abandon his human family. Will Jessica discover that her husband's immortal? Will he give his blood to her and their five-year-old daughter, Kira, so that they can always be with him? Suspense tightens neatly with modest melodrama but with a big sense of family life. Due is careful to portray David as both hero (he's charming and talented, polylingual, and a published author) and threat. He is, essentially, an alien trying to mimic a life that can never really be his. A sequel seems likely, though it may be hard to keep up the gripping originality here. ($65,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. From the Publisher When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever. Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans. Read more