Rating: 
Summary: Poetry vs. Controversy
Review: I truly enjoyed Colin's poetic, lyrical choice of prose and phrases. As always the sensuousness of the characters and of life shines through on every page without disappointment. However, there were times when I felt that pieces of the story were not developed enough. One moment Colin's talking about love and life and without transition he's discussing how to reconcile spiritual disconnectedness and/or beliefs. Overall, I was pleased with what I read, and appreciated Colin's attempt to discuss African spirituality and how those in the Diaspora worship.
Rating: 
Summary: Satisfy My Soul
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I especially liked the spiritual link. I got out of it that sin when full blown ends in death, which goes along with my own religious teachings. It was so exciting that I read the whole book on two airline flights. I think the erotic nature of the book and the way the story was told in the first person, present tense actually made it suspenseful. Mr. Channer is certainly a gifted writer to make all the connections into the African American-Jamacian history and also explain different religious philosophies at the same time. The book could be an erotic book, it could be a religious book,or a Black Heritage book if it were non-fiction. Mention of the World Trade Center Tragedy also added the the element of realizm. Mr. Channer also has a good grasp of explaining geography whether it be Chicago, Africa, or Jamaica. Obviously, I think this is an excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: HUH?!
Review: Either I read the book too quickly, or I read a different book than the 21 people who also wrote reviews of this book. I was confused from page 1 and it went downhill from there. I am a great fan of Mr. Channer's first novel, Waiting in Vain, as well as the short story he wrote for the anthology Got To Be Real. However, Satisfy My Soul just didn't do it for me as the previous works did. It took great effort for me not to return the book to Amazon.com for a refund. The love affair between Carey and Frances was too convoluted, as were Carey's attempts to work through his various issues. And as for the Christianity analyses/debates...I was completely lost. The latter part of the book seemed to sum up the entire novel (maybe I should have skipped ahead?), and the ending was pretty wild. I will revisit this book in a few months and see if I feel the same...I probably will.
Rating:
Summary: If you know your history, then you know your destiny.
Review: I have a battered copy of Colin Channer's,"Waiting In Vain" that I keep on my nightstand. When I travel, it travels with me. I read it several times a year to remain inspired. If you've read "Waiting", then you already know that it is a fatally sexy love story, but it is also a scattering of breadcrumbs that leads us gently and sometimes brutally towards a healing discourse between men and women of the Diaspora. I know a whole slew of women who go to sleep praying that Channer's hero; Adrian 'Fire' Heath will materialize on their doorsteps in the morning.
Colin Channer is a griot like none other. Now, with the advent of "Satisfy My Soul", I'm inclined to believe that he's a shaman who invades the bodies of regular folks, extracts the mystical lyricism from our ordinary lives and then daringly places the formulas for our survival into the hands of the general population. As an American, baptized in Judeo-Christian doctrine, if a while driving my car an eighteen wheeler swerved into my line I would definitely cry out 'Jesus Lord Have Mercy!' But should I be censored if I am one of those who asks my ancestors to carry my prayers to the feet of God or acknowledges Shango,Osun, Erzulie or Baron Samdi? Should I be fearful of ancestral altars, affirmations incense fetishes or candles? How have I managed to survive when the religion and other cultural aspects of my ancestors are regarded in a suspicuous light? And how important is it anyway? This is the crux of "Satisfy My Soul." When the rubber meets the road what spirits do you call on? The answer to this question straddles social, moral, psychological frontiers, but only scant few like Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and the sweet, delicious and sometimes wicked Channer can raise the stakes by throwing romance into the pot. Africa is embodied as the soul of a reckless, beautiful untamed woman, Frances. Carey, A Judeo-Christian oriented Rastafarian, is her passionate, yet confused suitor. They were lovers in an ancient African existence and they have a chance to get it right in this life. Though I will never understand Africa as those born there, I accept and seek Africa because quite honestly I am homesick on some levels and I am not alone. The stakes are so high in this novel, because as you realize the things in your history that you can not accept, you must come to realize that failure to accept the past is a barrier that impedes self-love and all of the other kinds of love...spiritual, paternal, fraternal, maternal, and romantic. At the end of this book, I cried for Frances and Carey.
Tears for what they could be to each other and what history will not let them be. These star-crossed lovers inhabit the small needing space required for yin and yang can slip themselves around each other. They have supernatural sexual encounters that transcend traditional gender roles, seeking penetration of the very soul. If you're familiar with Channer's work, then you already know that he dances on a supremely erotic line. The power of his literary voice is in its beauty and utter fearlessness. The romantic element in "Satisfy My Soul" is as much a healing balm for the reader as for the characters. Colin Channer takes you "there" this time. With the creation of Fire and Sylvia in "Waiting In Vain," he showed us how to get it right. In this novel, he shows us why it is so hard to accomplish that feat.
My overwhelming thought upon finishing, "Satisfy", it is get it right, right now, in this life. To quote Bob Marley, as Colin Channer is wont to do, " If you know your history, then you know your destiny..." Congrats Colin Channer, this brave book is so necessary.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: I must confess, initially I was confused. I just did not get it. Now, after reading the last page, I have gone right to page one again. The story line, the characters (especially Carey), the ending. This is no ordinary run-of-the-mill love story and Colin Channer is no ordinary writer. This book was well worth the wait.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: Your book is wonderful, Mr. Channer. It is brave. It is sexy. It is sweetly sad, without being melodramatic. You challenge us to question our faith, its origins, its basic constructs, its reality. You tantalize us with delicious (to the mind)atavistic alternatives that descend from our African, Jewish, Islamic, and "spiritual" other (or prior) selves. You dare to suggest a connection between atheistic denouncers and fiery born again penitents. You dare us to love our badly flawed parents. You dare us to define black. And you turn us on. Naughty, naughty boy, you turn us on. You turn us on with your bow-legged dun gold gap-toothed flesh tasty mango women--your chiseled dreadlocked mule hung hunk brooding goodlooking good men. You undress us with the turn of a page, a chapter of dialogue, a line of verse, a naughty word for a nice, a nice word for a naughty, a prim proper thin lipped slim hipped east Indian wife who has no business in that rain induced seduction nest matress loft with her husband's goodlooking good hung hunk good good bare chested best friend. I have never read a more delicious book. I've never met a book with more real emotion. This book will make you laugh and cry. It is as much a story about friendship and its boundaries as it is about love. It is as much a story about success versus unfullfilled potentional as it is about the nature of who we are as spiritual beings. Thank you, Professor Channer for titillating while you teach.
Rating:
Summary: "Passion's Naked Eye--The World of Colin Channer."
Review: As an African woman and as a writer of considerable
renown, I hadn't expected to so love Colin Channer's
"SATISFY MY SOUL" as I do. Quite wrongly, I had been
told that he was just a romance writer and part of the
"pulp" movement...but...with "SATISFY MY SOUL", he has
reminded me of the inherent literary fuse that creates
and sustains the magic realm of Male-female passions.
This is a book that you will not soon forget, and even
more rare than that--this is a book worth every penny
you'll pay to own it. Mr. Channer is a far better writer than he gets credit
for. There is no plain, run-of-the-mill romantic novel
writing here. This book is about love--essentially, SOUL
love, and the writer is brave enough to actually weave
and bind each paragraph with a growing understanding of
the ethos, passion and the RISKS of "surrender". It's a
truly smart book. I loved the heroine, Frances, because
it isn't often that a Black Male writer constructs such a truthfully animated and thoroughly adventurous-minded
"womanist" character as I experienced this lioness to be.
She is mother-root, stone woman and sexual synthesis all
in one. Fifth-dimensional and totally worth not only any
man's time---but worth the female reader's time. As for the male lead, let me just say that I cannot speak
of him without serious and "thigh-tingling" daydreaming. We
women are HUNGRY for real men (strong, rough guys who also
possess a complexity of spirit and a ruby-red knowledge of
passion's investment). That is what Colin Channer infuses
his man King with. A virbrant "human" displacement (his pain so real)...that when mingled with the lioness of the book...forms a kind of slow dancing jazz recital. A soul-kiss for the senses. SATISY MY SOUL is a da[rn] good book. You should go and buy
it. Not just to be entertained and not just to fantasize--
but to just thank God and curse him, too--that there is this
oddity of oneness known as MAN and WOMAN. Author Colin Channer
is "a good jinn" and proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he
is the possessor of passion's naked eye. Please...I admonish you...get in touch with the pulse of this book. KOLA BOOF
Author of "Long Train to the Redeeming Sin"
Rating:
Summary: This is hard to say, but I'll begin with...
Review: ...exclaiming how very much I love Colin Channer's writing. He is a master of lush description, honesty and realness. While reading Waiting in Vain, in fact, I put the book down several times to tuck my toes more tightly under me, to avoid his frequent trampling of them. He truly sang my life with his words, or the life of any thinking, passionate, non-Buppie (arguable) person of color trying to make a way in an all too slick, passionless world. I found myself putting down Satisfy My Soul often, too...to scratch my head in confusion. I think he simply tried to tackle too much in too few pages. Don't get me wrong, it was the most beautifully written/reading/sounding thing I've read in months, but it seemed hurried, underdeveloped, and at times over-ambitious. I am certain that he is capable of Gabriel Garcia Marquez scale greatness (whose work he refers to in SMS), and there are often glimmers of brilliance...but he falls short. A wonderful idea, beautifully written, but he needed at least 150 more pages to do the storyline, characters, and the novel as a whole, the justice it deserved. I absolutely believe that after a couple more books, when he decides to be the writer he can be, the writer he was born to be, he will be a literary force to be reckoned with...black, white, or other. Unless, of course, he chooses to limit himself to writing sex/love/sex stories forever, in which case he would be selling himself short. SMS clearly opens the door to where he can go if he wants to.
Rating:
Summary: THE WAIT HAS BEEN SATISFIED
Review: He is artistic, poetic, eloquent and adventurous---he takes you places you have never been. He makes the mundane seem sexy and orgasmic. Colin Channer has delivered another mesmerizing love story, featuring four very intelligent and loving, yet flawed characters.
SATISFY MY SOUL is extremely thought provoking; it's complex, yet entertaining and erotic. It evokes passion and your interest in the spiritual and religious beliefs of Frances and Carey, and at the same time it amazes you with the tragic love story of four very separate, yet entwined lives. You will be inspired. You will want more.
Rating:
Summary: Satisfy My Soul
Review: Satisfy My Soul is a breath of fresh air. The characters are real and make no apology for their being. The emotional presintation of each character is unique and intriguing. The religious and romantic statemts are ones that needed to be heard; and I thank this writer for being bold enough to wright it. The love scenes are smeltering! This is a must read. So don't miss this one!!!
|
