Great story. She's great weaving history into her stories. ( )

Odd. Nicely written, but a tad difficult to get into. As always, I enjoyed the imagery she presented, but felt the ending was not as nicely wrapped up as she usually aims for. The ending was rushed, and anticlimactic, but the story concept was fresh. ( )

A good departure from Rice's vampire series. This is a smart history speckled tale. I like it! ( )

From Amazon:
"Anne Rice takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon's temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, genji, demon, angel - pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to the Europe of the Black Death and to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction."

I read the first 4 books of the Vampire Chronicles and a smothering of other Rice books, but eventually lost interest and moved on to other things. I got this book as part of a paperback swap. I hadn't read any of her books for a decade or so. And it just did not work for me anymore. Her writing just annoyed me. I thought her characters sounded immature and naive. And the writing style just rubbed me the wrong way. I am not sure what about it I did not like, but it kept throwing me off. Hard to believe now, how much I loved "Interview with the Vampire" and "The Vampire Lestat" back in the days. ( )

He is a ghost, demon, angel - in love with the good, in thrall o the evil. He pours out his heart to us, telling his astonishing story when he finds himself - in our own time, in New York City - a dazed withness to the murder of a young girl called Esther and ineplicably obsessed by the desire to avenge her. He takes us back to his mortal youth in th magnigicent Babylone - the gateway to the pagan gods, a wonder of ziggurats, and ships at anchor from all nations. We see Azriel at twenty - A jew, educated, rich, Beatiful, fiercely devoted to his captive hebrew tribe, and dedicated to his prophets Jermiah and Isaiah. In this time of bloody wars and religious up-heavals, greedy king and cunning magicians who vie with rabbis for spiritual dominion, Azriel falls victim to a royal plot compounded by his devotion to his hebrew god - only to be plucked from death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into a Genii commanded to do their bidding. Challenging these forces of destruction, marshalling all his strenghth and wit to defeat them, Azriel embarks on his perilous journey through time - From Babylon's hanging gardens, to the europe of the Black Death to Manhatan in the 1990's - and ultimately to his crucial confrontation with the ambitious and charismatic multi-billionaire, the televangelst-terrorist Gregory Belkin, father of the mysteriously murderd Esther - And the twentieth century embodiment of all that Azriel has struggled against. As Azriel's quest approaches it's climatic Horror, he dares to use and to risk his supernatural powers in the hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and redeenning, at last, what was denied to him so long ago: his own eternal human soul. ( )