Bones Become Flowers - Softcover

Mowry, Jess

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1547215976 ISBN 13: 9781547215973

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017

Synopsis

Tracy Carter seems to be living the African-American Dream, her forty acres a lavish home in the Oakland, California foothills, her mule a $70k Land Rover. She has an eclectic but practical education, the means to indulge her passion for art; and at age 33 owns a successful boat-building business. So why does her story begin in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere? Is she on a mission to save children? Is she searching for her ancestral roots? ...Or, could she be on an unconscious quest for something much deeper, something long-buried in vine-tangled graveyards and shrouded in moonlit shadows of Voodoo? The meaning of life? Or the secrets buried within her own soul? ...Or does she even have a soul, and if she does could she lose it? Her journey leads her to the isolated children's refuge of Father Amaury, which seems at first a Garden Of Eden. Yet something isn't quite right. The children seem too angelic... except one, a 12-year-old boy who the good Father seems to fear, and who digs at night in the refuge's little graveyard, where, among other small skeletons, lies that of a gifted young wood-carver who died at the age of 13. But, are his bones actually there? Though Tracy finds the answer to that, it only uncovers more unburied bones -- metaphorically- speaking -- along with a Voodoo priest's warning that she has embarked on a fateful voyage from which there is no turning back. At first it begins literally aboard an ancient freighter powered by steam and fueled by coal, and crewed mainly by children, but then it becomes a frightening quest over a dark and skeletal sea toward a faint and distant light.

About this title

About the Author:

Jess Mowry lives in Oakland, California.

Review:

"A novel that is so compelling and so sensuous, so visionary and authentic, that the deeper you get into it the clearer you see how skillfully Mowry balances its tenderness with its brutality, its compassion with its obsession. Written in prose that is both flexible and controlled, it's a novel full of contrasting parts, ideas and elements -- dignity and desperation, art and life, self-reliance and 'fate,' a ship of 'wild' boys and a humanitarian American woman, a seasoned novelist and a precocious, doomed, beautiful child-genius. Set in a magical place -- Jeremie, Haiti -- Mowry's story is one of a strange sea voyage, of commonplace miracles, shanties... Voodoo, and the bright colors of death. But in this moonlit wasteland the power of redemption is equal to the devastation." Clarence Major, author of Dirty Bird Blues -- Publisher Comments

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1547215976
• ISBN 13: 9781547215973
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336