Flashback Friday is a weekly tradition started here at Bookshelf Fantasies, focusing on showing some love for the older books in our lives and on our shelves. If you’d like to join in, just pick a book published at least five years ago, post your Flashback Friday pick on your blog, and let us all know about that special book from your reading past and why it matters to you. Don’t forget to link up!

This week on Flashback Friday:

The Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice
(published 1979)

 Synopsis (Goodreads):

They were New Orleans’ gens de couleur libre – the copper-skinned half-castes who lived recklessly and loved passionately, trapped in a world between black and white.

Marcel – the young, blue-eyed scholar, sensitive, and longing always for Paris. Marie – his breathtakingly beautiful sister, cursed with the ability to pass for white. Cristophe – novelist and teacher, the idol of all the young gens. Anna Bella – light in skin, African in feature, chosen for the white man.

And from Amazon:

In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern history. Though descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who enslaved them. Called the Free People of Color, this dazzling historical novel chronicles the lives of four of them–men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.

Last week, I focused on Cry to Heaven, and heard from several people who were surprised that Anne Rice had written books outside of the vampire/witch/otherworldly realm. And here is another, The Feast of All Saints, which is Anne Rice’s second published novel, released just a few years after her debut novel Interview With The Vampire.

In Feast of All Saints, we get a slice of New Orleans history centered around the “free people of color” the young mixed-race inhabitants of the city who held a special status, at once admired and coveted, and yet manipulated and treated as less than equal.

The historical elements are fascinating, and the drama is rich, filled with emotional depth and tragic twists. When I read Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea a few years ago, I was immediately reminded of this early work by Anne Rice. If you’re fond of historical fiction and enjoy a New Orleans setting, I recommend tracking down a copy of The Feast of All Saints.

What flashback book is on your mind this week?

Note from your friendly Bookshelf Fantasies host: To join in the Flashback Friday fun:

• Grab the Flashback Friday button
• Post your own Flashback Friday entry on your blog (and mention Bookshelf Fantasies as the host of the meme, if you please!)
  
• Leave your link in the comments below
  
• Check out other FF posts… and discover some terrific hidden gems to add to your TBR piles!

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