Children fight to free themselves from an oppressive, segregated society in Cunningham’s dark fantasy.

Granny Rose, the “oldest storyteller left,” relays a tale to children around a campfire. It begins with four other grannies: Granny Sweep, Granny Spark, Granny Dirt, and Granny Brine. They each live in distinctive places (Granny Spark resides in a magical forest, for instance), but not one of them remembers how she got there.Granny Rose then recounts the tale of young Briar, who belongs to the “outside world” where poverty is rampant and the land is desolate. The comfortable people of the “inside world,” located underneath a vast dome, never feel rain or wind or any temperature that’s too hot or cold. This arrangement is essentially the creation of Noone, a sinister being who has a chief magician at his beck and call. Outside, members of the Guard actively subjugate the people, which includes going after “beauty singers,” whose songs are a form of rebellion. The oppressed population includes Briar, an aspiring beauty singer, and her two friends Sal and Jack. All three kids make an admirable attempt to escape the confines of the outside world. Granny Rose’s story gradually moves to a later time, when she herself is a young girl. Her mother and her peculiar twin aunties keep Rose a secret, hiding her away from both the inside and outside worlds. If she ever hopes to branch out on her own, she’ll likely have to face Noone, the ever-present villain.

Narrator Granny Rose makes it clear that Cunningham’s narrative is “not a children’s story.” It certainly tackles serious issues, namely the mistreatment of others based on social class and gender. The book has signs of violence as well, though much of it is implied. In this vein, characters deliberately withhold details or become evasive when someone asks a straightforward question throughout the novel; Granny Rose, for example, seems to be safeguarding the campfire kids from the story’s harsher content, and Rose’s mother declares her daughter to be “too young to hear about such things.” Readers will find plenty of wonderful surprises, particularly in the way Briar, Sal, and Jack fit into the Rose-centric tale. These four characters display valor, loyalty, and tenacity—Sal tries to determine her own fate by disguising herself as a boy, since that way she’ll likely do hard labor instead of being forced into sex work, as many young females are. It’s not all doom and gloom: The author makes several entertaining nods to classic fairy tales, sometimes directly and other times more generally (shoes, as they do in many fairy tales, play a crucial role in this novel). Rose’s aunties provide a touch of comic relief, with their nonstop banter complicating many conversations, whether they’re arguing or in complete agreement. The action picks up in the story’s latter half, and while the final act is definitely in no rush to reach the ending, the journey to get there is well worth it.

A diverting, insightful fusion of a dystopian yarn and a fairy tale.

A memoir traces one woman’s journey from mainstream Christianity to interfaith minister and novelist.

An established author, Cunningham is best known for a series of novels—The Maeve Chronicles—in which Mary Magdalene is revealed to be the descendant of Celtic warrior witches and Jesus spends his young adulthood on the Isle of Mona. This memoir is, in some ways, an account of how the daughter of an Episcopalian priest came to turn a Christian saint into a pagan priestess and the savior into an acolyte of the Druids. The author describes the God of her childhood as a distant, unnerving character—not unlike her own father. She found more solace in imaginary friends embodied in plush toys. Maeve Rhuad—her series’ protagonist—would become a different kind of imaginary friend in Cunningham’s adulthood. Between those years, the author would endure experiences that disrupted her journey through higher education and pushed her further away from mainstream Christianity. Her first encounter with “the Goddess” occurred in 1985, when she was enduring her second pregnancy loss (“All life comes from the sea, and the Goddess is the mother of all living, all that dies, all that is reborn”). At this moment, Cunningham started developing a spirituality that existed within herself and outside of Christian doctrine. In the second half of her memoir, she recounts how she reacted to the epiphany that would transform her spiritual life and set The Maeve Chronicles in motion. The author knows how to tell an engaging story, but there are long stretches that feel more like recollections Cunningham has to set down for herself than a carefully crafted narrative. That said, the author’s descriptions of participating in rituals led by the influential activist named Starhawk offer a valuable glimpse of the “Reclaiming (Neopaganism)” movement in its early days. And anyone who has struggled with a Christian upbringing and discovered meaning elsewhere may well find solace and inspiration in Cunningham’s vivid account of her own religious evolution.

An eccentric, iconoclastic, and sometimes meandering spiritual autobiography.

Third in Cunningham’s irreverent chronicle of Mary Magdalen (Magdalen Rising, 2007, etc.).

Maeve (aka the Healer Woman, aka Mary of Magdala) is back, as unapologetically lusty and smart-mouthed as ever. This installment considers the aftermath of Mary’s marriage to Jesus. Christ is always with her, but in less corporeal form. Newly resurrected, he’s left a motley crew behind to cobble together Christianity: pregnant Maeve, fractious Apostles, mother-in-law Miriam and friends Martha, Mary of Bethany and Lazarus. Knowing that Peter and James are scheming to appropriate Jesus’ offspring, Maeve flees Jerusalem for her sacred bordello/Temple of Isis in Magdala, Galilee. After giving birth to a girl, Sarah, with golden eyes identical to her father’s, Maeve heads for Celtic territory, Galatia, where she hides out in a mountain shack with baby Sarah and the endearingly loopy Miriam, who hears angel voices and croons litanies to herself. Androgynous Sarah does not welcome puberty. Itinerant, self-appointed Apostle Paul, battered by stoning, is deposited on Maeve’s doorstep, and she administers her healing touch, which includes a brief hook-up with the puritanical future saint. When he orders the Galatian women to be silent and quashes a snake-worshiping fest honoring fertility goddess Brigit, Paul triggers a major brouhaha. Sarah embarks on the trail of her absent-though-omnipresent father, and Maeve follows, too late: The Apostles, fooled by Sarah’s male attire, tried to circumcise her, and now she’s gone to sea. Maeve, sought after by sailors for her ability to manipulate the wind, traverses the Mediterranean in fruitless pursuit. Then, with Miriam, Maeve journeys to Ephesus, shrine of huntress-deity Artemis, the logical place for a band of neo-Amazon pirates led by Sarah to wash up. In Ephesus, Miriam prepares for her Assumption; Paul once again sets precedents for Church-sanctioned sexism; and 50-something Maeve takes a lover—John the Evangelist.

Gleefully iconoclastic. For that dwindling demographic with a sense of humor about religion, Maeve’s profane skewering of the all-too-human foibles of the Church fathers is a hoot.

Cunningham (The Return of the Goddess, 1992—not reviewed) offers a contemporary feminist fairy tale in which Lilith—far from being the evil, demonized child-stealer of the Judeo-Christian tradition—proves to be the archetypal Wild Mother without whose influence the modern-day family of Adam and Eva cannot be truly human or happy. An immortal race of women, all direct descendants of Lilith— by tradition, the biblical Eve's successor and Adam's first rebellious wife—lives in wild communion with nature in the uncharted Empty Land. The modern Adam, a charismatic professor of alchemy and magic, once ventured into their realm, captured himself a Lilith-wife and brought her back to modern civilization, where, before escaping, she gave birth to a daughter, Ionia, and—unheard of for one of her race—a son. When the novel opens, the children's thoroughly domesticated human grandmother (``Grammar''—who ``had not a very high opinion of nature and considered herself at war with it,'' feeling that ``nature ought to at least obey its own laws if it would not obey hers'') runs the household; Adam exploits his devoted colleague Eva while pursuing intellectual projects, advancing his coldly calculating male ambitions and scheming to trap his erstwhile wife, the unvanquished, essentially unknowable Lilith. Since Lilith has always wanted to reclaim her daughter, the ten-year-old Ionia becomes Adam's bait—leading to Lilith's captivity, Ionia's having to choose between being wild or human, and transformative experiences for one and all. Cunningham is not just jumping on the bandwagon to run with wolves; here, she gracefully blends the mythical and magical with the humane.