Voodoo Dreams
Honors for Voodoo Dreams:
1993 Selected for Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" series
Recorded Books, LLC, 2002 (Audio Distinction/ Earphones Award)
“Bewitching...a character of vast dimension and feminine power.” – Booklist
“An overwhelming journey navigated with skill and imagination...captures the dazzle and showmanship if voodoo.”
– Los Angeles Times
“I had a great time reading Voodoo Dreams. Marie is the most interesting character in American culture. Jewell Parker Rhodes did a wonderful job painting the possible picture of the Queen of Voodoo. I loved it.”
– Whoopi Goldberg
“Voodoo Dreams is filled with searching...and mystery. Jewell Parker Rhodes has cast a spell of a novel; each page contains language as vibrating as the city of New Orleans. If Marie Laveau still lives it is because Rhodes has been touched by her spirit. This book will make a believer out of everyone.”
– E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African American Resource Center, Howard University
“This first novel is full of tangible atmosphere and vivid detail. It is a fevered, gripping dream.”
—Susan Straight, author of I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
In Voodoo Dreams, Marie Laveau invents her self; cut off from her mother, from her past, and from her faith, with only her visions to guide her, Marie grows into the mantle of her power through great pain and hardship. In many ways Marie's journey is an allegory for my own life. My art, my writing became my avenue for exploring what it means to be black, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a mother.
How I came to write Voodoo Dreams >
Recorded Book also available through
recordedbooks.com >
See the WomenWriters.net August 2008 Special Issue on “Serving The Spirits: Women & Voodoo in Literature and Popular Culture”, including the following on Voodoo Dreams:
- Hearing, Writing, and Reading Voodoo: Cultural Memory in Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Voodoo Dreams and Voodoo Season
- Spirited Women: Conjure and Female Empowerment in Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Voodoo Dreams and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
- Women & Voodoo: A Conversation with Jewell Parker Rhodes with Kameelah Martin Samuel
See 2 scenes from VQ Dance Productions’ Voodoo Queen at Jewell's YouTube site


