Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Random House Large Print)
Hardcover – Large Print, November 8, 2005
Description
From Publishers Weekly Rice departs from her usual subject matter to pen this curious portrait of a seven-year-old Jesus, who departs Egypt with his family to return home to Nazareth. Rice's painstaking historical research is obvious throughout, whether she's showing the differences among first-century Jewish groups (Pharisees, Essenes and Sadducees all play a part), imagining a Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem or depicting the regular but violent rebellions by Jews chafing under Roman rule. The book succeeds in capturing Jesus' profound Jewishness, with some of the best scenes reflecting his Torah education and immersion in the oral traditions of the Hebrew Bible. As fiction, though, the book's first half is slow going. Since it is told from Jesus' perspective, the childlike language can be simplistic, though as readers persevere they will discover the riches of the sparse prose Rice adopts. The emotional heart of the story—Jesus' gradual discovery of the miraculous birth his parents have never discussed with him—picks up steam as well, as he begins to understand why he can heal the sick and raise the dead. Rice provides a moving afterword, in which she describes her recent return to the Catholic faith and evaluates, often in an amusingly strident fashion, the state of biblical studies today. (Nov. 7) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Praise for Christ the Lord “Riveting. . . . Rice's book is a triumph of tone -- her prose lean, lyrical, vivid -- and character. As he ponders his staggering responsibility, the boy is fully believable -- and yet there's something in his supernatural empathy and blazing intelligence that conveys the wondrousness of a boy like no other. . . . With this novel, she has indeed found a convincing version of him; this is fiction that transcends story and instead qualifies as an act of faith. Joins Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ and Endo's A Life of Jesus as one of the bolder re-tellings.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)Praise for Blood Canticle “When Anne Rice releases a new book in The Vampire Chronicles series, cheers from her huge fan base can be heard everywhere.” — The Edmonton Journal Anne Rice is the author of twenty-six books. She lives in La Jolla, California. Read more
Features & Highlights
- Having completed the two cycles of legend to which she has devoted her career so far, Anne Rice
- gives us now her most thoughtful and powerful book, a novel about the childhood of
- Christ the Lord
- based on the gospels and on the most respected New Testament scholarship.The book’s power derives from the passion its author brings to the writing, and the way in which she summons up the voice, the presence, the words of the young Jesus who tells the story.
