The Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Feast of All Saints
Book Review: The best work of fiction EVER-hands down!
Summary: 5 Stars
Being a female descendant of these gens de color libres, I felt a deep urge to read this book and learn about my cultural past. I first heard about "The Feast of All Saints" when I saw pieces of the made for tv movie on Showtime. I couldn't believe there was a movie, let alone a book written by Anne Rice detailing the ups and downs of Creole people in the pre-Civil War era. It was exciting! Rice does an exceptional job depicting a time that seems so long ago and forgotton. I absolutely could not put the book down. This is a real page turner and it reminded to never forget where I came from. I found a whole new understanding and meaning behind the world which I had a hard time understanding as a child while hearing stories about relatives from my grandparents and great-grandparents back in Texas and Louisiana. Much thanks to Anne Rice for bringing an awareness to readers about a culture that is slowly but surely dying.Book Review: This may be Rice's finest work!
Summary: 5 Stars
Unlike most of Anne Rice's other works, this one deals with a period and region in American history that has been little explored in popular fiction. The setting, in just post-Louisiana Purchase New Orleans, is perfect. The period and historical facts have been meticulously well researched and should be an eye-opener for most Americans, who tend to be woefully ignorant about their country's past. Her development of the characters, their attitudes, hopes and fears, is skillfully done. Altogether, this book is a great read that also imparts knowledge at the same timeBook Review: You are coming with me....Now.
Summary: 5 Stars
Roughly the first two hundred pages of this book deal with a young boy enrolling in a new school. In the process, the book tells us who this boy, Marcel Ste. Marie, is and brings passionately and atmospherically to life his people and their world. It's fascinating. It avoids cheap thrills to unfold like old fashioned literature into a great sensuous flower of a story that doesn't let go. Hints of Rice's customary obsessions are present in this early book but they are very restrained and so gain tantalizing power.The book deals with the free people of color in 19th century New Orleans, mixed-blood descendants of freed slaves- the proud old families who have established themselves as tradesmen and planters but also the children of white planters' quadroon mistresses. All are oppressed in subtle ways and walk a narrow path of propriety in response. Abandoning their heritage for more racially tolerant Europe is a constant temptation. Even the most refined, educated and prosperous members of the old families cannot vote. A respectable white planter must not be embarrassed by the second family he maintains with his mistress and all assume a mistress's pretty daughter will follow her mother's profession.
Marcel, his sister Marie, his friends Richard and Anna Bella come of age in this environment with poignantly intense youthful enthusiasms, affections and anxieties. Anything their elders cannot face has been kept from them until they reach the age when their world's injustices become unavoidable. They then find themselves at odds with traditional ways that formerly provided meaning and certainty. The story that develops can't be summarized but it builds to such a pitch that when you reach the words in this review's title you might just cheer aloud, as i did. This is historical fiction at its best.
Book Review: quick view of the novel
Summary: 5 Stars
I can only say that Anne Rice's novels are getting less as she goes on. Not that the quality of her books following this one are subpar, to say the least, they are all fantastic narritives. I only mean that The Feast of All Saints is by far her best writing to date and in fact one of the ten best books I have ever read. The book far surpasses anything I could have expected. As an avid Rice fan and a lover of the Mayfairs and her Vampires I must still say this novel is the epitomy of everything I love about her.Book Review: what a pity...
Summary: 2 Stars
This book has an author of obvious talent, interesting characters and fascinating little-known history, and yet it fails. I believe that reason for this is that it reads as if it was written far far too fast. It is a story about a vanished world, that of the Gens de Coleur Libre in Pre-bellum New Orleans. The main character is a talented, blond black boy, who develops a relationship with a man, a successful author who has returned from Europe to open a school in his native city. The boy is desperate to escape from the provincial town to Paris, which his plantation-gentleman father promised to him and his concubine mother.
Is it arrogance or sloppiness that allowed Anne Rice to write this so quickly and carelessly? Was the editor scared to get her to edit it and re-write it, as she obviously did so brilliantly in her first two Vampire novels? We may never know. It is another example of what I regard as a squandered talent. I will probably not try to read anymore of her books.
Of course, if you don't care how well a novel is written, and perhaps my standards are too high, this is a fairly good read.