This story imagines a wife for Jesus, questions gender roles, and offers adventure.
This was so interesting: a story from the point of view of an imagined wife for Jesus, including an exploration of gender roles, reimagining a rigid faith, marriage/child/parental/educational expectations for women, adventure, strong female loyalty and friendship, love, and lots of fascinating details of life at the time.
Much of the fever pitch of support and hatred for Jesus occurs off the page, when the book's main character Ana is off having other experiences (and often-dangerous adventures), so his role in her story is primarily as a faithful man who disagrees with the politics of the faith at the time, but most essentially as a person who cares for and understands and supports his wife.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
Kidd is the author of the lovely Secret Life of Bees as well as 2014's The Invention of Wings, which is on my to-read list (and was inspired by a historical figure of a slave in early 1900s Charleston). Kidd has written numerous other titles too.
This book made it onto my Greedy Reading Lists Six Historical Fiction Books I Loved This Year and My Twelve Favorite 2020 Books.