Joplin's Ghost » (Reprint)

Tananarive Due is an award-winning Essence best-selling author of Blood Colony, Living Blood, Good House, and Joplin's Ghost. She lives in Southern California with her husband Steven Barnes. Visit her website at www.TananariveDue.com.

When Phoenix Smalls was ten, she nearly died at her parents' jazz club when she was crushed by a turn-of-the-century piano. Now twenty-four, Phoenix is launching a career as an R & B singer. She's living out her dreams and seems destined for fame and fortune. But a chance visit to a historical site in St. Louis ignites a series of bizarre, erotic encounters with a spirit who may be the King of Ragtime, Scott Joplin.

The sound of Scott Joplin is strange enough to the ears of the hip-hop generation. But the idea that these antique sounds are being channeled through Phoenix? Her life is suddenly hanging in the balance. How will she find her true voice and calling? Can the power of her own inner song give Phoenix the strength to fight to live out her own future? Or will she be forever trapped in Scott Joplin's doomed, tragic past? Stunningly original, Joplin's Ghost is a novel filled with art and intrigue — and is sure to bring music to readers' ears.

The Washington Post - Thrity Umrigar

Due has undertaken a particularly hard task. On the one hand, she has created a dead-on, realistic depiction of the L.A. music scene…all told with a sharpness and attention to detail that reveal Due for the journalist she was. On the other hand, Due deals with the supernatural, with psychics and ghosts and out-of-body experiences that in the hand of a lesser writer might have left readers rolling their eyes. She pulls it off. Due's writing is spare but incredibly visual. She keeps her flights of fancy grounded to her story. Her matter-of-fact approach to the supernatural makes it easy for us to suspend disbelief.