Due, Tananarive

Tananarive Due is an academic and author whose books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Her collaborator and husband, Steven Barnes, is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels. In their collaboration The Keeper (Harry N. Abrams), illustrated by Marco Finnegan, Aisha has lost her parents in a car crash, and now she must move to decrepit and derelict Detroit to live with her ailing grandmother. But shortly after Aisha’s move, her grandmother’s health rapidly deteriorates. With her dying breath, she summons the dark spirit that has protected their family for generations to watch over her granddaughter. At first, it seems that this spirit, the Keeper, is doing what it was asked. But Aisha finds that this being can only sustain itself by stealing life from others, and she and her friends must come together to destroy it or die trying.