In Season (formerly titled VoodooSeason), Jewell Parker Rhodes revisits the sensual, magical landscape of her highly acclaimed debut novel, Voodoo Dreams.
Marie Levant, raised in the North by foster parents, begins her medical residency in New Orlean's Charity Hospital. Plagued by deja vu and haunted by increasingly violent dreams, Marie tries to make a life in a city that seems both foreign and familiar.
Without warning her world falls apart, for it is voodoo season: the season of heat, humidity, the West Nile virus, of unexplained deaths of young adults all with a mysterious symbol marked in red clay on their foreheads. It is the season of babies cut from their dead mother's wombs.
It is the season when the Guede, the death gods, haunt Levant--whispering tales, sending memories and dreams of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth century voodooienne, who walked on water and blended African loas with their Catholic saints, whispering tales of a second Marie, who murdered her mother and brought evil to the faith, whispering tales of a third Marie who died in a pool of blood, after abandoning her child to an orphanage. Marie Levant, the fourth Marie, must reclaim her heritage, reclaim the power of voodoo drums transformed to a jazz lament, reclaim her spiritual, womanist power. A contemporary epic and mythic tale, Marie learns "women hand down sight through generations, mother to daughter." She learns that love and passion can be intertwined, marriage and a profession can mix, and that a woman's love can redeem a world. She learns that there is no greater power than a mother's fierce passion and that of a woman secure in her self identity, secure in ancestral heritage as a black woman and a voodoo queen.
About the Author
Jewell Parker Rhodes is the author of the Louisiana Girls children's book trilogy, which includes Ninth Ward, Sugar, and Bayou Magic. The books in this series have received the Parents’ Choice Foundation Award, the Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, and the Jane Addam’s Children’s Book Award, among others. Towers Falling, her newest middle grade novel, is a Junior Library Guild Selection, an Amazon's Best Book of the Month, and an ADL Best Kid Lit on Bias, Diversity, and Social Justice selection. Another middle grade book, Ghost Boys, will be published spring of 2018.
Jewell is also the author of six adult novels: Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass’ Women, Season, Moon, and Hurricane, as well as the memoir Porch Stories: A Grandmother’s Guide to Happiness, and two writing guides, Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Non-Fiction. Her adult literary awards include the American Book Award, the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Award for Literary Excellence, and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Outstanding Writing.
Jewell grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Drama Criticism, a Master of Arts in English, and a Doctor of Arts in English (Creative Writing) from Carnegie Mellon University. Jewell is the Founding Artistic Director and Piper Endowed Chair at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She currently lives in San Jose.
