Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Told solely in the voice of Mary Magdalene (throughout the book called Mariamne, eventually to be called Magdal-eder, or She of the Temple Tower), this book begins when Mariamne is still a child in the home of her prosperous Jewish father, a glass merchant. Her mother dead, her only friend a ward of her father's called Salome (an Egyptian raised in Jerusalem), and her only confidante a fierce body slave named Tata, Mariamne is highly intelligent, always curious, and desperate for knowledge. Along with Salome, a child of wit, insight, and cruelty, Mariamne finds herself banned from her privileged home and dependent on the care and concern of a mysterious man called Seth. Eventually all three find themselves living for seven years in the Great Library of Alexandria. This is an immensely inventive book, a book that turns the known and not so known gospels on their heads, revealing meaning in them virtually unique in my experience. To have a familiar story turned inside out is to view it so differently that the meaning we think we know, becomes instead revelatory. Through Salome we meet a John the Baptist who is both sly and childlike, wise and brash, a loveable frightening man, willing to lose his life to save his chosen people. Through Mariamne we meet Jesus. This Jesus, known to her as Yeshu, is deeply complex, driven, a man of his times, and yet a man for all times. Raised as zealous for the Law, yet he is a man tortured by "visions," called on by a god who speaks so completely at odds from the jealous angry violent god he has been taught to follow, that his torment almost breaks him. Only by meeting Mariamne through their mutual friend Seth, does he slowly and painfully come to terms with the harsh demands of a simple man called on to be more than any man. He is the hero, reluctant, in constant hope of escaping his destiny, yet ultimately bowing to the inevitable, at which point he fulfills his "destiny" with a triumph of will almost unbearable in the implications of its choice...for he has a choice and by choosing it, rather than turning away, he uplifts our souls. And all the while we follow Mariamne as witness, as student, as teacher, as philosopher, as companion, as a woman perhaps unique in literature. She is not merely a disciple or a witness. She too is gifted with vision and she too struggles with "knowing" god. But in the mouth of Mariamne Magdal-eder we learn it is not "a god," a being, something outside the self, it is perfect love and inherent divinity that seeks us and whom we seek. As for Judas...this Judas is almost more a hero than any other in this extraordinary tale of tales. A double of his brother Jesus, a boon companion, Judas does what is needed when it is needed, sealing his fate for all time as betrayer, yet without him Jesus could not become the "Christ." Mariamne's voice is a voice to be heard. It speaks to us with a clear ring of human honesty and doubt but also with a voice beyond our normal voice, that of a visionary making thrilling sense of reality in unforgettable sentences replete with the meaning we all seek.