My Soul to Take by Tananarive Due
3 stars
(Excerpt from Amazon) Fana, an immortal with tremendous telepathic abilities, is locked in a battle of wills. Her fiancÉ is Michel. But Johnny Wright, a mortal who is in love with her, believes that if she doesn’t stay away from Michel, they will become the Witnesses to the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation.
Fana and the Life Brothers are rushing to distribute their healing “Living Blood” throughout the world, hoping to eliminate most diseases before Fana is bound to marry Michel. Still, they cannot heal people faster than Michel can kill them. Due weaves a tangled web in this novel, including beloved characters from her bestselling Joplin’s Ghost, in a war of good against evil, making My Soul to Take a chilling and thrilling experience.
The story begins with Carlos. His mother went missing in Puerto Rico then he receives a phone call that simply said she was dead. So Carlos goes to Puerto Rico to find out what is going on. While there, he stumbles into a group of people that are trying to hide a serious outbreak, which one of the victims is Carlos’s mother.
Phoenix, Carlos’s wife is a former rock star that is asked to perform a charity concert. Reluctantly agreeing to, while performing she finds that a lump in her breast is gone along with a stomach bug that Carlos picked up. The people in the audience are also cured.
We learn that Fana, an immortal that has healing properties in her blood, treated everyone at the concert. But she took a risk to do so. The immortals are all former people that have been given blood to keep them immortal except for Fana and Michael. They are the only two immortals that were born immortal. Although they are destined to marry, they have different feelings on humans.
Michael thinks that humans are a plague on this earth and has been using his blood to start all the different outbreaks of illnesses around the world. Fana feels that they should protect everything and everyone so she has been trying to heal all the outbreaks.
The story is mainly a conflict between Michael and Fana and within Fana about what she should do with her engagement to Michael. I didn’t realize that this was the last book in the African Immortals series. I’m sure if I read the series from the beginning I might have felt differently about it.
There is a good basic plot but I got bored with the back and forth between Fana and Michael. I could not even finish the book. I admit that I looked at the few other reviews out there and saw that Phoenix was supposed to be immortal but when I skimmed the rest of the book I didn’t really see much about her. It might have been a good book, but this one was not my cup of tea.
I received this book free from the Simon & Schuster Galley Grab Newsletter.
