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
A memorable portrait of a people at war—a war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view.
An action-filled historical novel by Ethiopian American writer Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, 2010).
The Italians who invaded Ethiopia in 1935 under the orders of the man whom the conquered people insist on calling, in quiet resistance, Mussoloni came aching to avenge a loss they had suffered 40 years earlier. They might have remembered how fiercely the Ethiopians fought. Certainly the protagonist of Mengiste’s story, a young woman named Hirut, does. In a brief prologue, we find her returning to the capital, where she has not been for decades, in 1974, in order to find an audience with the emperor, Haile Selassie, who is just about to be overthrown. She has a mysterious box, inside of which, Mengiste memorably writes, “are the many dead that insist on resurrection.” The box comes from the war nearly 40 years earlier, and it is an artifact full of meaning. Hirut was nothing if not resourceful back then: A servant in a wealthy household, she becomes a field nurse, but as the war deepens, she takes up arms and becomes a fighter herself, “the brave guard of the Shadow King”—the Shadow King being a villager who bore a reasonable enough resemblance to the emperor, who has gone into hiding, to be dressed like him, taught his mannerisms, and sent out in public in order to rally the dispirited Ethiopian people. "There are oaths that hold this world together,” Mengiste writes, “promises that cannot be left undone or unfulfilled.” Such is the oath that the emperor broke by fleeing the fight. Mengiste is a master of characterization, and her characters reveal just who they are by their actions; always of interest to watch is the Italian colonel Carlo Fucelli, who is determined to win glory for himself, and a soldato named Ettore Navarra, who has learned Amharic and wants nothing more than to live a quiet life, preferably with Hirut by his side. Hirut herself is well rounded and thoroughly fascinating—and not a person to be crossed.
A memorable portrait of a people at war—a war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-08356-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Keeping his own stylistic flamboyance in check, Boyle evokes a cultural flashpoint with implications that transcend acid...
Once Timothy Leary opened the Pandora’s box of LSD, everything changed.
Few novelists have benefited more from the freedom unleashed by the psychedelic revolution than the prolific Boyle (The Relive Box, 2017, etc.), but here he shows a buttoned-down control over his material, a deadpan innocence in the face of seismic changes to come. It’s an East Coast novel of academia by the West Coast novelist, and it’s a little like reading Richard Yates on the tripping experience. The novel’s catalyst is Dr. Timothy Leary (“Tim” throughout), though Boyle has wisely opted not to make him the protagonist but instead a figure seen and idealized through the eyes of others. At the novel’s center is the nuclear family of Fitzhugh and Joanie Loney and their teenage son, Corey. Fitz has been struggling to support himself as a Harvard graduate student in psychology, one of Leary's advisees, though one who is, as the title says, on the “outside looking in” as the psychedelic hijinks commence. It isn’t long before Leary seduces his student into the inner circle, where Joanie joins them and the nucleus of this family starts to destabilize as they make themselves part of a larger communal tribe. All in the name of science, as Fitz continues to believe, though Leary soon finds himself ousted from Harvard, his work discredited, his students in limbo. Is he a radical, reckless visionary or a self-promoting huckster? Perhaps a little of both. Without advocating or sermonizing, and without indulging too much in the descriptions of sexual comingling and the obligatory acid tripping, Boyle writes of the 1960s to come from the perspective of the '60s that will be left behind. It is Leary’s inner circle that soon finds itself on the outside—outside the academy, society, and the law—living in its own bubble, a bubble that will burst once acid emerges from the underground and doses the so-called straight world. In the process, what was once a means to a scientific or spiritual end becomes a hedonistic end in itself. And Fitz finds his family, his future, his morals, and his mind at risk. “I could use a little less party and a little more purpose—whatever happened to that?” he asks, long after the balance has been tipped.
Keeping his own stylistic flamboyance in check, Boyle evokes a cultural flashpoint with implications that transcend acid flashbacks.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-288298-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
