Not my favorite of the series so far, I think it was simply that I wanted more of Rose. Good book. ( )

Barbara Hambly's research for this book is impressive. ( )

4.5 stars ( )

I appreciated Ms. Hambly's sensitive treatment of voodoo, which parallels my own experience of it in Kumasi, Ghana in the late 70s. She did have an error on the Biblical side; it wasn't Gideon, but Joshua, who made the sun stand still. (p.243)
I have my favorite bits - the protagonist's slow healing from grief, for one, but pain is described just as well, such as "Or was she still treating her son with frozen politeness tempered by martyered courage?" (p.296)
Ms. Hambly says things I want to believe - "Forgiveness is stronger than the graveyard dust of the past" (p.303) One of the reasons I read novels is to see this demonstrated, because it's so hard to believe.

( )

This is No. 3 in Hambly's Benjamin January series. Unfortunately, the shortcomings I noted in the first two books continue here, and I just couldn't keep going this time. The setting really appeals to me, and January is an interesting character. But I find Hambly's style monotonous; secondary characters don't come to life and I lose track of who's who because they mostly get talked about, not seen in action; again I was finding her emphasis on the obvious heavy-handed and repetitive. Free people of color in 19th century New Orleans had as much reason to fear for their safety as slaves, or former slaves, yeah I get it---even when she shows the reader that this is true, she finds it necessary for her characters to tell us what we just saw. I couldn't make myself care who killed Isaak (if he's even dead, which I doubt) and I was fairly sure that somehow January would get his sister cleared of the charge, but I wasn't too curious about how....so I quit about 150 pages in. This series should be much better than it is, and it makes me sad. Despite my interest in the multi-leveled milieu of the time and place, which carried me through A Free Man of Color, I barely made it to the end of Fever Season, and could not finish Graveyard Dust. It just isn't enough of a factor to keep me reading these rather tedious books.