Blood Colony: A Novel

Tananarive Due

Atria Books

2008

If you’ve raised a teenager, imagine this:

Your kid? The same one who won’t pick up her clothes from the floor of her bedroom?

Her blood can cure diseases. Seriously.

Illnesses like sickle-cell anemia and AIDS will go away if patients just get drugs, legally or illegally, made from her blood.

What’s more, she may be the hope of the world.

And she knows this.

How’s that for messing with your head? Heck, you don’t have to have been a parent for this. Just imagine being this kid and think about how screwed up you’d be.

This is where we begin in Blood Colony, the latest from Tananarive Due.

We’re catching up, several years later, with Fana, daughter of Dawit and Jessica from Due’s African Immortals series.

It’s Fana whose blood can cure diseases, and although she’s accepted how special she is with equanimity, she’s in many ways a typical teen, chafing under the restrictions her parents and protectors have placed on her and longing for love.

When Fana feels that she and her friends are threatened — and realizes she can do more on the outside than she ever did under lock and key — she takes a chance and heads for the outer world. She soon finds out that she’s not as prepared for some possibilities as she thought she was, and learns to her horror that she may not be the only chosen child.

As a refresher, the first couple of books in this series, My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood, were basically extended metaphors for vampirism, without all that pesky biting or manbiguity. Fana’s “specialness” is genetic; she gets it from Dawit, an immortal of Ethiopian descent.

In Blood Colony, Jessica once again stands in for those of us who can’t believe what we’re seeing, need everything explained to us several times and secretly just want to wake up in a world without immortals and weird religious sects.

For all that you may be moved by the idea of finding cures for diseases that largely plague people of color — and by the idea of those cures being found by and among people of color — there were some serious problems here.

Too many doggone plots, for one.

You’ve got a coming-of-age story, a road-trip story, a good-vs.-evil story, a teenage love story, a story of teenage alienation, a story about illness, a story about hope, a story about the illegal drug trade and a story about a marriage with secrets.

(As a side note, I’m a Roman Catholic, and know well how disorganized the Church can be, so modern-day nefarious plots centered at the Vatican strike me as silly. Since so much of this book is about Ethiopians, wouldn’t it have made more sense to have your religious nutso eviltards be associated with, say, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church? I’m just saying.)

And I left this book confused.

I want to read the next book in the series, but I’m not sure it’s for the right reasons. I want to read it out of annoyance and my freakazoid obsessive-compulsive desire to make sure all the loose strings are tied — not because I’m genuinely excited about what happens next.

And that troubles me.

I know Due can do(!) this. She’s not a writer who spits out overdone sentences; I credit her years in journalism for that. Casanegra, which is largely her work, was one of my favorite popcorn books of 2007. Joplin’s Ghost is a fave, as is My Soul to Keep, the first book in this series.

But Blood Colony puzzled me, because it just had too much going on. It’s not a bad book by any means, but some of those storylines should’ve been pared.

It pains me, but: B- to C.