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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780060561079
ISBN number: 0060561076
Label: Avon
Manufacturer: Avon
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 560
Printing Date: September 01, 2006
Publishing house: Avon
Release Date: August 29, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 546727
Studio: Avon
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Product Description:
In his very first novel, the national bestselling The Book of Shadows,James Reese beguiled readers with a boldly imaginative, darkly erotic tale of awakening that introduced the captivating and deeply unusual Herculine. Now this extraordinary writer continues Herculine's incredible journey of self-discovery -- a search that will lead her into a world of shadows and perils, where she will taste the forbidden and find redemption.
September 1826. Taught to trust ... and to learn by a quartet of remarkable saviors, Herculine is bound for America, leaving behind a strange and violent past in France for an uncertain future in an exotic new land. Arriving in Virginia, Herculine is led by fate to Mother-of-Venus, a mysterious old slave woman who is blessed with gifts both terrifying and strange, and to a young poet named Edgar Poe who is haunted by evils of the past. Under the mystical guidance of Mammy Venus, Herculine soon calls upon her powerful legacy to rescue Celia, a beautiful, damaged slave. Landing in the coastal wilds of Florida, Celia stirs passions -- and dark, otherworldly powers -- within Herculine, propelling them into an erotic obsession that only the missing witch Sebastiana d'Azur can break.
Hope comes in a missive that will lure the desperate Herculine north, to the chaotic streets of New York and a strange, magical house in which the confused and eager witch is accepted by a band of like-minded sisters and introduced to exquisite carnal pleasures. Finally loosed from the shackles of shame and desire, Herculine heads south once again to find salvation and fulfill her destiny.
Set in a time of promise and peril, bondage and bloodshed, James Reese's lush, richly atmospheric, and beautifully told tale shatters the boundaries between the living and the dead, the magical and the ordinary, the imagined and the historical. A novel of the mind and the senses, The Book of Spirits is a mesmerizing and unforgettable work from an exceptional talent.
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Rated by buyers 
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I read and enjoyed Reese's very first book, Book of Shadows (even though it was overly descriptive for my tastes), so I bought this second book in the series. Unfortunately, I'm finding it very hard to get through because, even though the story itself is interesting, there's such a burdensome amount of description that I find myself skimming whole pages just to find the tiny bits of story hidden in them. While the very first book was written with lovely language (and I enjoy a book that pays attention to the actual words used as well as the story being told), this one seems to be trying too hard. There's a lot of trite phrasing, such as "I walked, nay ran...", "I glanced, nay stared...", over and over again, and when I say everything is described in grand detail, I mean EVERYthing. Every movement, every article of furniture in a room, every inch of skin on all of the characters. Yes, it's well-researched, but it's almost as if Reese wanted everyone to know just how much time he spent researching everything by cramming every single piece of information into this story. I'm a third of the way through the book so far and Herculine has only just been told what this book's quest will be!
I honestly believe that if Reese had trimmed this book by at least half, it would have become a bestseller. As it is, it's simply too much work to slog through, even for those of us who love language and historical fiction.
Rated by buyers 
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After reading Book of Shadows, the very first entry in the Herculine trilogy, I thought that it was a Gothic novel on par with the ultimate in the form, Melmoth the Wanderer. After reading the second I'd say even that book has been surpassed. Slowly, SLOWLY reading these books -- I lingered over this one for six months -- has been one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life.
The Herculine trilogy is nothing less than revolutionary for many reasons. Let me just rattle off a few off the top of my head -- they are winding, labyrinthine, messy, rich and detailed in an era of workshopped pre-fab boredom -- they are politically incorrect and show witches for what they really are, not sympathetic victims of religious bigots a la The Crucible and every single book about witches that came after it -- they are more historically accurate than any of the junk you'll find in the "history" section of your local propaganda outlet i.e. bookshop -- they are incredibly evocative, and this book recreates miasmic, Dantesque visions of colonial American cities in your mind in such detail that it feels like virtual reality.
In fact these books are so good, and "James Reese" is so vague in his one interview that exists, that I actually suspect these of being written by a secret society of some kind, or maybe even a vampire using a pen name. "Reese" is just too knowledgeable about the occult engine of recent history, and it strikes me as fairly unbelievable that any single human could have written 1,500 or so pages of exquisite prose with this much research in such a short space of time. But if he did, prosit.
The Book of Spirits sensuously carries you, like Mephistopheles flying with Faust through the air, through setpiece after setpiece, each one more grisly and unsettling than the last. After Herculine's arrival in America, and her misadventures trying to free the mulatto slave-girl Celia, Reese unveils two unforgettable sequences. The very first plays out in a place called Cyprian House, a witchly brothel that not only caters to the politicians of Old New York, but makes their careers as well. It seems you're no one in politics until you've given a witch the power to blackmail you -- keep that in mind subsequent time you waste your day voting! The madam of this brothel is a lazy, fickle woman who forgets promises made to her charges, and puts them into situations that could even turn a witchly stomach, all the while pretending to be their best friend and surrogate mommy; witches in general do not seem big on loyalty or compassion. But she is nothing compared to Sweet Marie, a hag with a Prospero-like command of the animal kingdom, as well as an army of undead. Truly, the stench of hell rises from these pages. What Reese shows so well, in increasingly extreme forms, is how the witch, detached from spirit, sinks into materiality, physicality, a kind of corruption and rot that turns humans into animals, and then into some kind of psychopathic fungus, worse than any beast or bird could ever be. No horror movie, no book you've ever read has ever had a character like Sweet Marie. Just typing the name fills me with dread.
Our protagonist Herculine herself ( she's a hermaphrodite, but comes off as primarily female ), as a young witch, has not yet reached this point. She is still relatively appealing as she comes into possession of her powers, and in her attempted love relationship with Celia she might remind you of a kitten that feels a little guilty after ripping into its very first canary. But Reese is very sly about how he uses her character. For instance, in the wars between Indians and the army, she is on the side of the Indians, a clever way for Reese to show the supernatural bond between the groups ( pagan women and Native Americans ), which is obvious enough if you read any New Age "literature," or watched any recent Bjork videos. It's also funny how she takes an instant, irrational dislike to the character of Edgar Allen Poe, whose colossal ambition, stylish bon mots, and just general life force will probably seem charming to the reader. That makes sense as well. Poe, like yours truly, was very Catholic in sensibility, despite his love for the macabre, and thus no friend of the dark powers -- though his mother here is a whory actress who, as a ghost, seems like the personification of vanity run amok, with an unfortunate penchant for gratuitous display much like some of today's starlets.
I could write 1,500 pages myself just on the subject of these books, almost every page brings a new insight into witch-human relations and how they effect our "ghoul-haunted land." If there is a flaw it's that Herculine's powers are hard to grasp, vague like in a superhero movie. When Book of Shadows ends she has done nothing except, with the help of her mystic sister, sent two undead demons into easeful oblivion, more like a priest staking vampires than a witch ( if I remember ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
The narrator and protagonist of the book is Herculine, a hermaphrodite witch who is a tad more feminine than masculine, and so I find it more comfortable to discuss Herculine as as though she were a woman.
In this trilogy, the author creates a story about witches that includes a richer, more cogent, and more fascinating mythos of the witch than anything I've seen since the witch novels of Andre Norton. The witches in Reese's story are even more interesting and engaging than Anne Rice's Mayfair matriarchs, possibly due to the fact that they are not all of one family, but individuals and strangers sharing the common tie of witchcraft. Rather than a family like the Rice's Mayfairs, these witches are a separate race, related but apart from humanity. The clever concept of witches as a race enables the author to introduce a greater variety of characters from practically all walks of life, making for a richer, more engrossing story. The characters themselves are so interesting that you feel impelled to learn more about them. Individual novels could be written about any one of the witches in the book, or from many of the support characters.
Though it is easy to understand why the prose may annoy some readers, I read it as an experiment in prose styles. Remember that the narrator, Herculine, is a French witch writing in the English of the early 19th century. The flamboyant, overwrought sentences are therefore a good fit, and form a credible prose style for a character of her time and background. If you are a reader of victorian prose, especially women's writing, the prose may remind you of the novels of Rhoda Broughton (the niece of J. Sheridan Le Fanu), or Ellen Wood.
Though the prose in itself was very interesting to read, there was only one prose style in the book--Herculine's, with brief, negligible samples of prose from other characters. I was tempted to make a comparison to A.S. Byatt's Possession, but I can't because Byatt's book offers a much greater variety of prose styles very well executed.
The Book of Spirits combines several genres. It is fantasy science fiction, but to a greater degree, it is a historical romance. Possibly this is why the book was so interesting. You feel caught up in the sweep of history, as Reese writes in a lot of early 19th century events occurring in America. For example, Herculine finds herself escorting a slave woman to freedom in Florida, of all places. You'd think they would have gone north, but no. Also, Herculine and related characters meet the young Edgar Allan Poe, and the evil ghost of his mother, a dead actress. You will read about the Matanzas massacre, and about other historical events and battles that you'd never read about in a high school history book.
I have not read the third book in the series yet, but I have a theory about where Herculine is headed, and what her destiny is. I think she will find a way around "the blood", the mysterious way of death for witches that no witch has ever been able to escape. How will she do it? Pick up your copy of The Witchery, by James Reese, and find out for yourself.
Rated by buyers 
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This book has received some praise for its great research. While this is nice, great research does not make for a great book, and even Reese himself apologises in the back of the book for the liberties he took with some of the characters (like Poe's perhaps?) Speaking of which, Poe, a great writer (I think we can all agree), never even used specific locales or information about his charactes in his stories, so I'm not sure if great research qualifies a book to be great.
To be honest, I liked the very first book by Reese, but this one did not work for me. The namby pamby and prosaic narrative by the Orlando-like Herculine seemed haphazard, slapdash; the disgusting descriptions of the rotting female corpse/ghost repulsed me altogether. It seems much of this book depended solely on the "grotesque," and while that may be okay for some people, it is not my idea of good or great fiction.
I did not make it very far in this book to be honest. I am sorry to say so, for I thought I was going to enjoy it!
Rated by buyers -
I found this story to be more focused on gore than on storyline or characterisation. Hurculine is in Virginia now and there are some interesting characters but none of them are as fleshed out as they should be. Book Of Shadows was far more elegant in prose and left haunting imagery in my head. This one seems a little flat. Still an interesting story, but not as good as the first.
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