Venom Is the Healer

Seventeen year-old Naja Wadjet is a prodigiously gifted and promising Guyanese-American student at New York's acclaimed Alvin Ailey School of Modern Dance. Her once certain future as a principal soloist for the legendary company is thrown into disarray by the sudden eruption of her family's darkest secrets. As her home life crumbles, Naja is forced to abandon the comfort and security she as known as the daughter of a prominent and well-to-do minister in the West Indian enclave of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and fend for herself in a world without structure, rules, and seemingly without mercy. Her journey carries her by turns, into the protection of a affable herpetologist with a troublesome way with words and an unlikely penchant for contemporary dance, into a passionate affair with a brilliant and handsome choreographer with dark secrets of his own, and then through the perilously seductive fantasy world of Miami's nightlife before finally casting her into the mysterious heartland of Haiti's Vodun religion where insurgency simmers behind pastoral beauty, galling poverty and ancient magic, and nothing is what it first appears. With the tender guidance and love of a Mambo, a High-Priestess of Vodun, and some uncanny synchronicity facilitated by a street smart stripper with ample moxie and stylistic flare to accompany her beguiling curves, Naja navigates her fraught eighteen month passage into womanhood and lays claim to all the power it beholds by learning for once and for all, that just as sure as it kills, Venom Is The Healer.