She is sustained by her fearless aunt Yaltha, who harbors a compelling secret. Ana's pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome's occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. She engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women.
Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. Thank you for supporting our publishing ministry.In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. To keep reading, subscribe-subscriptions begin at $4.95-or log in.
This article is available to Christian Century magazine subscribers only. But a survey of Goodreads (where, with nearly 15,000 ratings, the book hovers at 4.3 stars) and the New York Times best-seller list (where the book happily perched for several weeks) reveals that most readers are gobbling up the book. Along the way, Ana participates in many familiar moments from the Bible: she is baptized along with Jesus in the Jordan, she tends to a wounded friend with the help of a kind Samaritan, she is welcomed into the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and she dabs at Jesus’ bloodied face when he falls on his way to Golgotha.Ĭonservative readers of the Bible are likely to find the insertion of a self-confident wife into the story of Jesus rather appalling. In each location she struggles to find a place for her writing amidst her other callings as friend and wife, home-keeper and child-carrier, muse and hermit. The book follows her from the mosaic floors of Sepphoris to the crumbling village of Nazareth to the shining streets of Alexandria. Ana harbors a secret longing to be a writer. The Book of Longings tells the story of Ana: daughter of Herod Antipas’s head scribe, sister of Judas Iscariot-and wife of Jesus of Nazareth. Both of these types of preconceptions can be seen in the critical reviews of Sue Monk Kidd’s new novel. After all, if Jesus came to destabilize the familiar, perhaps that’s what literature about Jesus should do as well. Others expect the novel to disturb, challenge, and subvert their presumptions. Some wish to live more deeply within the historical world of the Bible while remaining inside familiar narrative and theological lines (whatever those might be). Readers of biblical historical fiction carry vastly different expectations-often unknowingly-when it comes to the author’s responsibility to the biblical text.
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