My Soul to Keep

Harper Voyager

My Soul to Keep
Tananarive Due
1997

The Summary
"Jessica is an African-American journalist as ambitious as she is bright.  She is chasing the biggest story of her life, a story that strikes closer to home than she knows.

"Dawit is an immortal, whose ancient thirst for wisdom leads him to break the first commandment of his kind:  not to fall in love.

"Together they are about to pay the ultimate price for their ambition...and their desire."

The Good
Tananarive Due creates a fascinating and inventive novel in My Soul to Keep.  She pulls from religion and myth, drawing from a myriad of cultures and countries and continents, extracting fascinating bits of history to create an intricately woven story of loss and love, life and death and immortality--and all of its terrible implications.  My Soul to Keep is beautifully executed, crafting an exquisite story that's one part tragedy and one part family epic that tosses together a number of people (immortal and otherwise) into a tangled web.

Let me say this, 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 conformed to one of my Read Harder Challenge categories, I jumped at the chance to read it.  Not only was I impressed by depth of the novel, which explores the human heart and the effect of immortality on man, 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 her novel in the 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 might have experienced during those tumultuous 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, four hundred years before the story begins.  She weaves together an enchanting, sometimes terrifying story, that encapsulates a variety of human experience--a tapestry of history that reflects the beliefs, the culture, the language of each and every age she visits in her novel.

My Soul to Keep is exceptional in that regard.

But 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.  Although it sometimes seems to develop slowly--that is, it took a little longer than I expected for me to put together some of the pieces--I was pleased with how the narrative evolved, how Jessica changed when she learned Dawit's secrets, Dawit's actions in trying to protect his family and his flashbacks to his not-so-immediate past.

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 each chapter.

I loved My Soul to Keep.  It's just a good book all around, and it's probably one of my favorite this year.

The Bad
No complaints.

Seriously, none.  At just over eighteen hours, My Soul to Keep was a bit lengthy for my usual tastes, but I enjoyed it, nonetheless.  It took me about two weeks to finish the story, since I could only listen to it a couple of hours a day when I walked my dog or drove my car, or when I worked early in the morning before opening.  But if you're interested in it, I certainly wouldn't let the time present an obstacle.

Due's novel is worth reading, and I highly recommend it.

The Ugly
There were a few moments during which I had to stop the tape and take a minute to process what had happened.  Sometimes, it was difficult to proceed with the story, because it hurt to see how everything was starting to fall apart for Jessica and Dawit.  My heart was breaking for them as their lives took a turn for the worse.