The House of Erzulie

De: Kirsten Imani Kasai

Narrado por: Ron Butler, Adenrele Ojo

The House of Erzulie tells the eerily intertwined stories of an ill-fated young couple in the 1850s and the troubled historian who discovers their writings in the present day.

Emilie St. Ange, daughter of a Creole slaveowning family in Louisiana, rebels against her parents by embracing spiritualism and advocating the abolition of slavery. Isidore, her biracial, French-born husband, is horrified by the brutalities of plantation life and becomes unhinged by an obsessive affair with a notorious New Orleans vodou practitioner.

Emilie's and Isidore's letters and journals are interspersed with sections narrated by Lydia Mueller, an architectural historian whose fragile mental health further deteriorates as she reads.

Imbued with a sense of the uncanny and the surreal, The House of Erzulie also alludes to the very real horrors of slavery as it draws on the long tradition of the African-American Gothic novel.

©2018 Kirsten Imani Kasai (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Thought Provoking

Deeply enjoyed this book. It took me out of myself to journey into a world oft considered but I was too worried to enter.

beautiful and vivid southern horror and magic

graphic in its beauty. If you like reading about the South, this one is unique; this one is based in NOLA from a multigenerational story descending from mixed African race slave owning families with a backdrop of voodoo, affairs, slavery, abolition, mental illness...this one gets wild

Fascinating!!

I truly loved the topic of this book and would actually love to see this made into a movie. My only criticism is whenever slaves were mentioned the author described them as "shuffling". This was insulting to my intelligence. Other than this, this book gave me what I expected.

Satisfying!

I loved this book! The story was complete, the narrators were perfect! Well done!! A must listen!

Wow!

Such a great mind...I truly loved the correspondence, Emily's letters, Isidore's journals supposed verbiage from Genevieve's letters, the culture, and the brutal reality of societal southern history, including colorism...a very creative really great story.Thank you!!

Glad I gave this a chance

It’s an interesting story that takes you back in time. I liked the narration as well. I love the use of letters. I do struggle with long books, and this is long, but that’s not a comment on the book, more so about preference for me. I am enjoying this and I’m almost done with it. Glad I gave this a chance,

This book was terrible!

The main character Lydia deals with mental health although educated. The books goes on and on about her poor self. The story leads nowhere. She’s in a her owe head. I waited and wished that it would come a head but it never did.