Rice’s long-awaited spiritual memoir details growing up Catholic in New Orleans in the 1940s and ’50s, her 38-year absence from the Church as an adult and her slow but steady return to faith in the late 1990s. Kirsten Potter has a beautifully modulated voice, but seems too young for the autobiographical musings of Rice, who was born more than a generation earlier. It would also have been lovely if the audio version offered musical chanting and singing of the Latin cadences Rice discusses in the memoir as being so instrumental in forming her faith, instead of just spoken recitations of them. However, the audio does offer a welcome bonus: more than 20 minutes of an intimate interview with Rice, conducted by a friend who is a Catholic priest. She discusses her childhood faith, love of Saint Francis and new desire to write a Christian fantasy series. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 15). (Oct.)

The best-selling novelist writes here about her return to her New Orleans roots and her Catholic faith. Fans of Rice's novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt(2005) and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana(2008) will likely find this memoir interesting. The narration by Kirsten Potter (Red Helmet) is appropriate for the subject matter-lively and subdued as necessary. [The Knopf hc was called "a must," Xpress Review 9/16/08; bonus interview with the author.-Ed.]
—Pam Kingsbury

In her first work of nonfiction, Rice (Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, 2008, etc.) tells the story of her departure from, and return to, her Creator. This spiritual autobiography focuses on the author's youth in New Orleans and her reconciliation with Catholicism during the past decade. Growing up in the Crescent City during the '40s and '50s, Rice was surrounded by an entirely Catholic world in which she reveled. Drawn to church history, the lives of the saints and the beauty of the liturgy, she maintained an unquestioning faith and a deep desire to live a heroic life for God. Late in her teenage years, after her mother's death from alcoholism, Rice moved with her father and sister to Dallas. The change in lifestyle was so complete, she remarks, that "we might as well have been entering America for the first time." It wouldn't be long before she began questioning everything she once believed, and by the time she graduated from college she was an atheist. That change, she now realizes, was prompted by her distaste for the rigid, restrictive Catholicism of the time (circa 1960): "I could not separate my personal relationship with God, and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church." After several years of bohemian existence in San Francisco, Rice hit it big in the literary world with her fiction about Lestat and his fellow vampires. Throughout the nearly four decades of her atheism, however, she longed for her lost faith. Collecting sculptures of saints and visiting holy sites across the world, she struggled with her desire to believe. Finally, in 1998, she reconciled herself to the Catholic Church and found that its character had altered greatly since her youth. In 2002,she made a further personal decision to commit her writing from then on to God. Rice's rather banal prose doesn't do justice to the anguished content, but her story is honest and moving nonetheless. First printing of 200,000. Book-of-the-Month Club/Literary Guild featured selection

[A] very affecting story of a well-known prodigal’s return. . . . Called Out of Darkness is the vivid, engaging tale of the journey of a soul into light.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Rice couples her writing talents with the zeal of a recent convert.” —Christianity Today
  
“Rice could rival C.S. Lewis as a popular apologist for the faith.” —Time

“Rice’s memoir shows what true belief really involves. It exacts a price. James Agee had a lovely term for this. He called it ‘cruel radiance.’” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Anne Rice is not a convert but a revert. . . . A loving reconstruction of the pre–Vatican II Church of the 1940s and 1950s. . . . [After] twenty-five years and twenty-one books . . . Rice entrusts both herself and the people she loves to God.” —First Things
 
“Called Out of Darkness is rich in both poetic simplicity and liberating confessionals. This memoir is not to be missed.” —East Bay Literary Examiner
 
“I am not a Christian and I normally don’t read what I would call Christian books. They don’t appeal to me, they don’t interest me and I normally pass them by in the bookstore. . . . [But] I picked up [Called Out of Darkness] up this afternoon and it’s beyond wonderful.” —Jamieson Wolf
 
“As a long-time reader of Anne Rice’s, the impetus she presents here makes me want to re-read many of her prior works. I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks the inspiration and motivation behind the bestselling novels they’ve read.”—BookReporter.com

“Nothing short of magnificent. . . . What a real blessing, what a vulnerable sharing.” —Flos Carmeli

“A lovely, intelligent book.” —PopMatters

“Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a religious person—even if you are not a Christian—read this book. Anyone can appreciate the message contained in Called Out of Darkness. . . . It is a thinking person’s approach to faith.” —Edge (Provincetown, MA)