Published 21st April 2020 by Tinder Press.
Read April 2020.
Ana is a very unusual young woman for her time. From a very young age she has been interested in reading, writing and learning - pursuits deemed, not only unnecessary for a female, but most unseemly for a girl who should be thinking just of marriage and motherhood.
But Ana's position as the only child of head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, has put her in the privileged position of being able to study as much as her disapproving mother will allow and she spends the precious moments she devotes to her beloved studies copying the words of the matriarchs of the scriptures onto scrolls that she keeps in a chest in her room.
Ana is rebellious at heart and wants more than the life her parents have marked out for her, and she is encouraged by her aunt Yaltha - herself a woman of learning and unconventional notions. So when she meets the young Jesus, his ideas and passion call to her, and she longs to be free of the marriage contract her parents have arranged to further their ambitions.
Yaltha emboldens Ana to express her inner desires in prayer. Ana wants to be "a voice" and to be free to choose her own fate in this world, and her life is about to change in ways she could never have imagined - for Ana is about to become the wife of Jesus of Nazareth.
**********************************************************************
Where do I even start to try to do justice to the beautifully written and utterly compelling The Book of Longings, by the writer of the sublime The Secret Life of Bees?
In this book, Sue Monk Kidd has taken on the mammoth, and might I say, incredibly brave task of reimagining the life of Jesus as one in which he had a wife - rather than being the celibate and scholarly single man we are used to hearing about. For a number of years now, it has seemed to me to be somewhat of an anachronism that a man of the first century, living the life that Jesus is said to have lived, is always described as being unmarried. So I was looking forward to reading this book enormously and as soon as I read the first line I knew I was going to be in for a treat - it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck!
I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.
I was curious about how Sue Monk Kidd would tackle Jesus himself in her book. I am not a religious person, but can appreciate that there was a difficult path to be walked with this one. But our author takes exactly the right line, from the perspective of a novelist, and not from a religious stance. As such she has produced a book which is full of humanity and tenderness, which I found surprisingly touching. Ana is not married to a paragon, but to an ordinary man - one who is capable of great love as a son, a brother and a husband - albeit one who comes to see himself as a man with a singular purpose.
She takes just the right amount of what we have read about Jesus from the Bible and works this into her story, in a way which gives The Book of Longings very wide appeal - I particularly enjoyed the way Judas has such a central role to play in this book, and the way his part plays out in these pages gave me real pause for thought.
However, from the very beginning, Sue Monk Kidd's intentions are clear about where she wants to take us with her novel. This is going to be Ana's story. It is obvious that Ana's journey is going to be one fraught with difficulties, as we cannot fail to be aware of the fate of the man she marries, but this is ultimately a book that sings the song of female friendship and power - that gives voice to Ana, and her small group of female companions.
And what a fabulous cast of female characters we have - all of them women of unfathomable inner strength, who support, and transform each other. It is the voices of the women who sing out from these pages. The women who have been silenced and made invisible over time. It is the women who carry this story and their struggle is still relevant today.
The Book of Longings is the most incredible book and one which will stay with me for a very long time. Trust me, it is one you are really going to want to read.
EXTRA TREAT: As part of the Audio Blog Tour for The Book of Longings, I am honoured to be able to bring you the opportunity to listen to Part Four of the first section of the fabulous audio book version HERE. See the poster below for the fabulous bloggers who are hosting the other parts!
Thank you to Caitlin Raynor, Publicity Director of Headline and Tinder Press for gifting me a copy of this fabulous book, in return for an honest review.
From the cover of the book:
'I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus.'
In her mesmerizing new novel, Sue Monk Kidd brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman called Ana.
Ana is a rebellious young woman, a gifted writer with a curious, brilliant mind, who writes secret narratives about the neglected and silenced women around her. Raised in a wealthy family in Galilee, she is sheltered from the brutality of Rome's occupation of Israel. Ana is expected to marry an elderly widower to further her father's ambitions, a prospect that horrifies her. A chance encounter with the eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything: his ideas and his passion are intoxicating.
Taking Ana on a journey she could never have imagined, The Book of Longings is a glorious evocation of a time and a place where astounding events unfolded, and of one woman's fate when she fights to make her voice heard.
No comments:
Post a Comment