My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due

Reviewed by Ambrea

Jessica is a journalist.  Ambitious and bright, she’s poised on the edge of a story that will make her career—and she couldn’t be happier.  She’s married to a wonderful man named David, she has a beautiful and vibrant little girl, and she has a job she loves.  Life is perfect, until a sudden tragedy leaves her reeling and reconsidering her work as a journalist.  As she puts the pieces of her life back together, she discovers small clues behind the story she’s investigating and the deaths that have shaken her foundation—and she’s about to learn that her perfect life is a perfect lie.

Dawit  (David) is an immortal.  His thirst for knowledge has led him astray, causing him to stay in the mortal world and, worse, fall in love.  He’s drawn to Jessica and her daughter.  He loves them, more than he can say, and he’s desperate to keep them in his life, but, as his desperation leads him to commit greater atrocities, Dawit—and Jessica—will pay a terrible price for his missteps and his deadly desire to keep his wife and daughter in his life forever.

Tananarive Due creates a fascinating and enticing novel in My Soul to Keep.  She pulls from religion and myth, drawing from a myriad of cultures and countries and continents, extracting the most fascinating bits of history to create an intricately women story of loss and love, life and death and immortality—and all of its terrible implications.  My Soul to Keep is beautifully rendered, crafting an exquisite story that’s one part tragedy and one part family epic that tosses together a number of intriguing, wonderful characters (immortal and otherwise) into a tangled web.

Let me say first, I loved this story.  I stumbled across it purely by accident when I was scrolling through the audiobooks on my local library website and, when I realized it was perfect for my Read Harder Challenge, I jumped at the chance to read it.  Not only was I impressed by the depth of the novel, which explores the human heart and the effects of immortality on mankind, I fell in love with the history Due included in her novel.

My Soul to Keep delves into a particularly dark part of American history, setting a portion of the novel in Louisiana shortly before the Civil War.  She confronts the reality of slavery, the violence and loss that so many people faced on a daily basis, and she does a spectacular job of illustrating what someone like Dawit—who carries a mighty secret—might have experienced during those tumultuous and terrible times.

Due also draws upon many different parts of history:  Chicago during the Jazz Age, Miami in the bustling modern world, Spain during the Inquisition, and even Ethiopia from Dawit’s childhood, more than four hundred years before the story begins.  She weaves together an enchanting, sometimes terrifying and tragic tale, that encapsulates a variety of human experience—a tapestry of history that reflects the beliefs, culture, and language of each and every age she visits in her novel.  My Soul to Keep is absolutely stunning in regards to the depth of historical detail it provides.

However, I really enjoyed the story, too.  It has a complexity that’s thrilling, an undercurrent of suspense and menace that leaves the reader on the edge of their seat as they uncover Dawit’s history and watch his story unfold.  Although it sometimes appears to develop slowly—that is, it took a little longer than I expected for me to personally put together some of the pieces—I was pleased with how the narrative evolved, how Jessica and Dawit’s relationship changed when some of his secrets come to life, Dawit’s actions in trying to protect his family and his flashbacks to his not-so-immediate past.  Their story is compelling and rich and magical and, ultimately, tragic.  Although I would often have to pause the tape and take a minute to process what happened (my heart was breaking for them as I realized their lives were taking a turn for the worse), I was riveted from the first chapter.

Since I listened to Due’s novel as an audiobook, I have to say I was particularly pleased with the narration.  Peter Francis James does a stellar job of reading My Soul to Keep, melding flawless narration with an exceptional story.  His voice brought life to the characters, gave them a singularly unique voice and an emotional impact that left me nearly breathless at the end of each chapter.  His voice added a layer of richness and emotion that I appreciated from the very beginning.

Overall, I absolutely loved My Soul to Keep.  It’s a great book all around, and it’s probably one of my favorites for the year.  At just over eighteen hours, My Soul to Keep is a bit lengthy for my usual tastes, but I enjoyed it, nonetheless, and I certainly wouldn’t let the time present an obstacle.  Due’s novel is worth reading or hearing, and I highly recommend it.

Ambrea's Read Harder Challenge, Part 3

I’ve discovered some more books as part of my commitment to the Read Harder Challenge of 2016, and I’ve found some great stories in my explorations.  I’ve managed to:

1.      Read a horror book

2.      Read the first book in a series by a person of color

3.      Read a play

Usually, I don’t read horror novels.  Dracula and Frankenstein are about it for me, but I have managed to read Stephen King’s The Shining and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, among a handful of other novels that are considered good and scary.  And so, in order to satisfy my challenge criterion and read a horror story, I read Something Strange and Deadly by Susan Dennard.

Although I didn’t initially lump Dennard’s novel into the horror genre, I reconsidered my stance after necromancy and ritualized violence became involved.  The novel is pretty mild, all things considered—I mean, I certainly wouldn’t put it at the level of The Walking Dead or Stephen King, or even Dracula—but it’s still rather gory and riddled with a tough kind of suspense that leaves readers hanging on the edge of their seat, hoping for more answers.  However, I think it’s the zombies that pushed it over the edge and helped me give it a final designation as a horror novel.

I wouldn’t call Something Strange and Deadly one of my favorites, but it isn’t a bad book; in fact, I initially enjoyed it.  I liked the creepy atmosphere it evoked, coupled with the turn of the century setting, and I even liked the story:  a wicked necromancer comes back from the dead to terrorize Eleanor Fitt, while the Dead continue to rise from their graves across Philadelphia.  It’s an intriguing adventure, to say the least; however, I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the story when I examined it in retrospect.  The phrase “shut pan” annoyed me to no end.  (Part of me began to think the author found a new, novel phrase and decided to run with it.)

Next, in reading the first book in a series by a person of color, I picked up My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due.  As the first book in the African Immortals series, My Soul to Keep fit the bill perfectly to fulfill this challenge and check it off my list.  I stumbled across it purely by accident, finding it in audiobook form on my local library’s website—and I was immediately hooked.

I was intrigued by the premise:  an Ethiopian warrior stumbles across the secret to immortality and spends the rest of his eternal life alternating between identities, enduring a number of years as a slave on a Southern plantation, before becoming a Civil War soldier, a jazz singer, and, finally, a college professor and author.  His is a story of sorrow and loss, a tale of desperation in which he tries to hold tight to the ones he loves.  I was riveted from the first word, from the first moment the narrator spoke and started to weave a complex, beautiful story about Dawit—David—and his wife, Jessica.

At just over eighteen hours long, it took me a number of weeks whittling away at the story to complete it, but I have to say I was thrilled.  It’s detailed and strongly written (and narrated by Peter Francis James, who has an amazing voice by the way), and it’s absolutely riveting.  The story packs a punch, pulling together a myriad of religions, myths, cultures, and countries to create a flawless tapestry of history and suspense, beauty and sorrow.  I became emotionally invested in Dawit and Jessica’s story, and I found myself hoping for the best outcome—and crying (just a little) when tragedy strikes.  Tananarive Due is an excellent writer, and I highly recommend picking up My Soul to Keep.

Last, I worked on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.  Having read a portion of the play during a theater history course in college, I was intrigued about the prospect of reading the entire play this time around.  It was just my good fortune that I found a copy of the play for a dollar at my local used bookstore.  It’s almost as if it were fated to be.

A Doll’s House is an interesting play, not action-packed or suspenseful (like Something Strange and Deadly or My Soul to Keep above).  For the time period, it’s a thought-provoking work and, even now, it raises a lot of questions about women as spouses and mothers—and it makes one wonder about the typical roles of women in society.  It’s a play that’s designed to make an audience think, rather than thrill.

I thought it was fascinating to see how Nora managed to flaunt convention, managed to get what she wanted and needed despite the restrictive constraints of her time that were placed upon her gender, and, more importantly, proved she was capable of making her own decisions.  Personally, I found it was slow going, but I think it’s definitely worth reading once, especially for readers interested in theater.