The Book of Longings
By Sue Monk Kidd
Penguin Random House
I hadn’t read any reviews or plot summaries when I picked up this book, so I was in for a surprise. The first line of the book tells readers who the narrator is: “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder.”
The Book of Longings is the story of Jesus’s wife. But Jesus didn’t have a wife, I hear you thinking. If he did, like most women of that time, I’m sure she would have been erased from history. Author Sue Monk Kidd imagines what his wife would have been like. And she does a lovely job.
Ana grows up in a wealthy family, sheltered from the grim reality most people lived in 2,000 years ago. She is much wealthier than Jesus and in the novel his family laughs at her when she arrives at their lodgings with too much luggage.
She’s a strong-willed woman and highly intelligent. Kidd has created a relatable, human character and done a masterful job of integrating her into the story we are all so familiar with. Ana’s father is a scribe and he has reluctantly taught her how to read and write, skills not many women possessed at that time. She uses those skills, along with papyrus and pens provided by her father, to record the stories of women who have been silenced throughout history, including some of her own friends and contemporaries.
Her brother is Judas, a complicated character whose reputation has survived these millennia. Kidd weaves his plot inextricably with Ana’s, using his character to reveal parts of Jesus’s story that Ana doesn’t witness.
Kidd, who is from Georgia in the United States, is the author of several previous books, including the bestsellers The Secret of Bees, The Mermaid Chair and The Invention of Wings.
I’m not even close to an expert on Christianity, but even I could recognize the depth of research that went into this novel. Many of the characters are real people, whose histories are renowned still today. Many of the settings, including a monastic-like community of philosophers and scholars in Alexandria, are based on real places.
Kidd has taken on an ambitious project with The Book of Longings, and she fulfils its promise.
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