The Feast of All Saints KINDLE MOBI by Anne Rice H.A.

Anne Rice's The Feast of All Saints is quite different from the many supernatural/vampire novels she is so well known for. A beautiful and lush novel set in both a unique place and time during pre-civil war era New Orleans, The Feast of All Saints deals with an intriguing topic of which little has been written of in popular fiction: the lives of the gens de couleur libre, the mixed race Creoles of color. Anne Rice presents us here with an extremely well-researched and beautifully written book.
The novel concentrates on the fortunes of the St. Marie family. Cecile St. Marie is the haughty matriarch of dark skin and fine european features who was rescued as a little girl from St. Domingue during the revolt, and her two children by a plantation owner who keeps the family in luxury in New Orleans. The daughter Marie, who can "pass" for white and is set to debut at the city's "quadroon" ball and thus become the mistress of a wealthy white man, loves a black skinned man from a free black family. (Problematic as their culture, so based on the shade of skin, does not approve of the mixing of light and darker skinned people of colour.)
The main protagonist of the story, however, is Cecile's son Marcel, who yearns to be a recognized and respected artist. Marcel excels as a student and has been promised life in Paris to continue his studies when he comes of age. Marcel hangs all his hopes upon this dream, and it this dream of Marcel's that speaks both to the difficulties and the triumphs of these people.
The free people of colour in antibellum Louisiana lived lives very different from free blacks in other parts of America. Despite the strict codes of colour that ruled the world around them, as well as the relationships within their own community, they created a rich and highly cultured society in the midst of prejudice and the world of slavery.