{"id":7361,"date":"2026-09-25T04:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7361"},"modified":"2026-09-25T04:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:59:10","slug":"mazywood-by-tananarive-due","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7361","title":{"rendered":"Mazywood by Tananarive Due"},"content":{"rendered":"

One winter morning in 1958, a woman walks out of a lodge on Mount Shasta carrying an axe. The sign over her own driveway bears the name of the character that made her rich, engraved on a placard she paid a fortune for, and she swings at the left post until the wood gives. Her guests, two of the most famous Black entertainers alive, watch from the living room window. Her children watch from upstairs. Nobody outside the household will ever learn why. Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> is a novel about that woman, and the argument a reading group will have about her is the reason to choose it.<\/p>\n

Tananarive Due Writes Two Timelines<\/h2>\n

The first half of Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> opens in 1926 in Gracetown, the Florida town where several of Due\u2019s other books are set. Mazelle Washington is the accidental fourth child of parents who once toured as a family act, ten years younger than her twin sisters and convinced she is invisible at her own dinner table. Playground lore holds that a pool in the woods grants wishes on one condition: specify everything, because a wish will look for the gap. Lonely and seven years old, she asks for someone who will belong to her alone, love her above everybody, and go onstage at her side. She does not think to add the word human.<\/p>\n

Her answer is waiting in the road on the walk back, caked in mud. It bows to her. It stands upright and waltzes. And it does what she tells it before she has said anything aloud. Two years on, no Black child in the industry is paid more than she is, and she fronts a cheap answer to the decade\u2019s most popular kid-comedy series. That strand runs to her deathbed in 1980.<\/p>\n

The second covers one weekend last December. Her grandson is sixty, a director who built a career on slasher sequels while the film he cared about stayed unmade. He owns the mountain lodge she left behind and has never once holidayed there. This time he brings his two daughters and his wife, who is newly pregnant and quietly researching the great-grandmother nobody in the family will discuss. What Mazelle hid on that mountain is still on it.<\/p>\n

The Woman a Group Will Argue About<\/h2>\n

Start with what is done to her, because Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> keeps a long list. Sound arrives when she is nine and the studio decides her character needs an accent, so a white woman is brought in to model it while her mother sits in the room. Her hairstyle is dictated by people who want her to look neglected on camera. By the time anyone admits her wages are keeping the household afloat, she has worked it out. A producer waves a superb screenplay at her, a role with dignity in it, uses it to buy four years of her working life, then casts her as a shuffling servant. He puts his hands on her in his office, and there is no authority she can report it to. Years later the Black press she grew up reading turns on her for films her contract forbids her to refuse.<\/p>\n

Now set against that what she does. She kills, more than once, on purpose, and takes pleasure in it afterwards. She raises two children she is frank about not wanting, and one will carry an injury she gave him for life. Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> refuses to settle the account either way. The harm done to her buys no absolution, and her cruelty does not retroactively shrink the harm. Holding both at once is what the book asks, and it is the best thing on a group\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

What Tananarive Due Does With Hattie McDaniel<\/h2>\n

By 1939 Mazelle is eighteen and back at the bottom, hired as background on Gone with the Wind<\/em> for five dollars a shift. There she is adopted by Hattie McDaniel<\/a>, and the novel briefly stops being horror at all.<\/p>\n

The McDaniel of these pages is an analyst. She lays out her arithmetic coolly: servant parts are not her preference, and the work waiting if she turns them down is actual domestic service. Being flawless on set is strategy rather than disposition, since the studio can replace her and cannot replace the man she acts opposite. The Black performers keep a secret card game in a store cupboard, run on house rules about staying quiet and bringing no bottles, whose whole function is an hour off from being watched. Later, two Black women smuggled separately into the same whites-only hotel end up alone in a bathroom, and the more celebrated of the two explains why no leading role is coming for either of them, and it has nothing to do with how good they are.<\/p>\n

This is the part of Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> a group will still be chewing on next month. It converts a piece of film history everybody thinks they know into a workplace, with rates of pay, tactics and losses.<\/p>\n

Where Tananarive Due Overruns<\/h2>\n

Bulk.<\/strong> The modern half of Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> sags in the middle. Characters trek out across the snow, trek back, trek out again, and by the third crossing a reader is ahead of them.
\nThe dead relative who gives directions.<\/strong> Stuck on a cliff or lost in a drift, the grandson keeps being talked through it by an apparition. Affecting at first; by its fourth appearance the ghost is a walkthrough guide.
\nThe living cast cannot compete with the dead one.<\/strong> Two threads set up with real care early on, one about a woman unsure she wants the child she is carrying and one about the stakes riding on her research, more or less evaporate once the weather turns.
\nA minor character given a soul purely to lose it.<\/strong> An outsider arrives with a whole chapter of history behind him, and his only job is to be found dead.
\nToo much rests on one unlikely overlap.<\/strong> The past reaches the present via a physical resemblance plus a borrowed wardrobe, on the exact weekend it would do most damage.
\nWeigh the content before you pick it.<\/strong> Bodies in pieces and a chamber lined with bones. Two forms of child abuse by relatives, one a burn. A husband who hits. An assault by an employer, narrated from outside the body it happens to, and the coercion of young performers hoping for work. Slurs, and a sustained look at minstrelsy. Cancer, bedsores, and grown children weighing whether to end their mother\u2019s life. A badly broken foot. Risk to an unborn child.<\/p>\n

For the Group<\/h2>\n

Judgement.<\/strong> Is she a wronged woman who turned monstrous, a monstrous woman who was also wronged, or is the whole either-or the wrong tool? Do not stop at your first answer.
\nAsking badly.<\/strong> Both disasters of her life begin with a request whose conditions she failed to close off. What does Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> seem to believe a wish actually is?
\nThe daughter nobody listens to.<\/strong> The youngest character is thirteen, neurodivergent, and has built her entire skill set out of survival programmes on a screen. She turns out to be right when every adult around her is wrong. Has the novel earned that, or is it tidier than life?
\nLegacy, stated aloud.<\/strong> Two characters explain the theme in speeches near the end. Did you need telling?
\nThe final page.<\/strong> Talk about it before anybody finds their coat.<\/p>\n

Groups who finish Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> should read The Reformatory<\/a> next, set in the same Florida town and the better novel of the two. For another Black gothic built on a household\u2019s buried bargain, This Cursed House<\/a> by Del Sandeen makes a strong pairing, and Harlem Rhapsody<\/a> by Victoria Christopher Murray suits anyone who wants the history without the monster. Mayra<\/a> by Nicky Gonzalez is the closest match for the Florida strangeness, and Solace House<\/a> by Will Maclean is the colder, quieter alternative for a group that found the gore too much.<\/p>\n

What It Leaves Behind<\/h2>\n

Due credits two sources for this book, and the pairing is worth knowing before you discuss it: the film historian Donald Bogle<\/a>, whose history of Old Black Hollywood supplied the period, and her own recent enthusiasm for survival reality television, which supplied the child. That combination explains the shape of Mazywood by Tananarive Due<\/strong> better than any summary could.<\/p>\n

What lingers is not the creature on the mountain. It is a dying woman in 1980 giving instructions to the only thing she ever loved properly, arranging protection for descendants she has never troubled to know, and getting the terms wrong one final time.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One winter morning in 1958, a woman walks out of a lodge on Mount Shasta carrying an axe. The sign over her own driveway bears the name of the character that made her rich, engraved on a placard she paid a fortune for, and she swings at the left post until the wood gives. Her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}