Pemba’s Song: A Ghost Story

Reading The Rainbow: Book 5
Title: Pemba’s Song: A Ghost Story
Author: Marilyn Nelson and Tonya Cherie Hegamin
Medium: Book

Pemba’s Song: A Ghost Story is the story of Pemba a young African American teenager who has recently moved with her mother from Brooklyn, New York to the small town of Colchester, Connecticut where her mother plans on teaching at the Colored School. While in the new house Pemba starts seeing glimpses of another girl looking at her in the mirror. This other girl is Phyllis, an eighteenth century slave who lived in the same house hundreds of years before. She’s trying to tell Pemba something, but Pemba might be too scared to find out.

This story really wasn’t scary, or tense, or even creepy. Granted it’s a young adult book, and it is well written but nothing about it caused me any real concern. Even the scenes where her head is pounding and she’s about to pass out were just there. Nothing heart pounding. Maybe it’s because I read this so close to reading something as creepy and tense as Joyce Carol Oates’ Zombie but the ghost part of this story just wasn’t doing it for me.

Overall rating: 2/5 – it was okay
Classification: African American Authors
Female Authors
Young Adult
Horror?

Zombie

Reading the Rainbow: Book 3
Title: Zombie
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Medium: Book

I grabbed this book off the shelf of my local library for two reasons, the first is that I’ve read Joyce Carol Oates in the past and I tend to enjoy her books, and secondly, with a title like Zombie I thought she might have been drabbling in horror, and since my boyfriend is a huge horror buff I thought it might be a book we both might enjoy.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about the type of Zombie Oates mean. Zombie follows Quentin P (no last name given) who works as a caretaker at his family’s boarding house that is mostly occupied by foreign exchange students that attend the local university. Quentin took the job because he had previously been convicted of molesting a young, mentally disabled African American boy. He takes the caretaker position as a way to keep a low profile.

Quentin also has a large number of disguises, he uses them frequently as he drives around Michigan picking up young men, usually homeless men of color, who in his mind “don’t matter” to have sex with. These encounters are no longer giving Quentin what he wants or desires so he resolves to create a zombie. To prepare, Quentin reads up on performing lobotomies and even picks up the needed tools from various stores in Michigan wearing different disguises.

This book was creepy but in all of the best ways. Because it is from Quentin’s perspective there isn’t an in-text reminder that he’s crazy. Everything Quentin is said as thought it’s a perfectly rational and reasonable thing to say. With each attempt he makes at creating his zombie you feel Quentin’s hopes rise. You can feel his obsessions and the highs and lows of his emotions. Creepy. It was great but it gets the “WTF did I just read” tag for the subject matter.

Overall Rating: 4/5
Classifications: Female Authors
Horror?