An ideal example of how fiction can be used to present and explore alternative concepts in history and religion.
A grounded retelling of Christ’s life and the early days of the church from the gospel of his ailing nephew.
In this fictitious gospel, Joseph ben Jude, the nephew of Jesus (called by his Hebrew name, Yeshua), sets forth to correct the emerging myths that threaten to taint Christ’s legacy. Not long after his death, Yeshua’s origins have become steeped in superstition, with tales of a virgin birth of the literal son of God. Joseph tells instead of the careful planning and mystical divinations of the Essene Jews who selected his grandparents, Joseph and Mary, to conceive this prophesied Messiah. Luck (Melissa Etheridge: Our Little Secret, 1997) presents an accepting, progressive Yeshua who mingled his rabbinical studies with the teachings of the Hindus, the Zoroastrians, and the Buddhists. Joseph muses on Christ his uncle as much as Christ the Messiah, speaking at length about his father and other uncles, along with the extended family of Yeshua’s followers. Like in any family, there’s squabbling; the apostles struggle with how to lead after Christ’s death, and the public becomes confused and uncertain. These difficulties, along with competition and persecution from other religions, only serve to compound the misinformation Joseph seeks to debunk. Joseph’s prescience of the emergence of other philosophies is a clever conceit of the novel, which organically introduces gnostic and other alternative Christian teachings. Throughout the book, the resurrection is dissected as well, challenging the belief of Yeshua’s physical rebirth with the possibility of a spiritual one and breaking down the differences. These theories are impressively accessible and introduce new concepts that parallel fairly well-known historical and biblical events while using modern names for people and places throughout.
An ideal example of how fiction can be used to present and explore alternative concepts in history and religion.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1782799740
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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