A review by elisegmusic
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

The Book of Longings imagines a world in which Jesus takes a wife, Ana, before starting his ministry. Ana is the daughter of a wealthy family, and she is taught to read and write, something uncommon for women in those days. She is entranced by stories and longs to have a voice for people to listen to. Instead, her parents engage her to a man twice her age. Ana falls in love with Jesus and, when her fiancé dies, she and Jesus get married, which lowers her station dramatically, but she gains a partner in life who believes in her dreams and encourages her.

If you are not familiar with the Bible, I think the political situation is a little confusing. I had to research what was going on in Palestine at that time - The Holy Roman Empire was controlling the land, and many Palestinians wished to be free, particularly for religious reasons, as they believed the land was promised to them by God, and they did not wish to be ruled by polytheists. 

Ana was such a beautiful character, and she will feel familiar to most women - in a world where women are being silenced, Ana longs for an equal voice in society and on the page. All the ideas in her world belong to men, and Ana is well ahead of her time and wishes to change that. She is the hope to the oppressed. 

Ana also has two powerful women by her side - Yaltha, her aunt, who teaches her everything she knows about spirituality, and Tabitha, her cousin whose tongue is cut out for speaking out against her rapist. 

There is no condemnation of Jesus or religion in this book - instead, it’s a reimagining of the lives of all the women left out of the Bible. In her afterword, Sue Monk Kidd says, “It could be argued that in the first-century Jewish world of Galilee, marriage was so utterly normative, it more or less went without saying.” Much of Jesus’s early years are not written about, so it is certainly possible that he got married ten years before his ministry. 
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