The moderator of our book club shared the link to this poem with us. One of the sources that Sue Monk Kidd used in this book is a real poem called The Thunder: Perfect Mind.
Although there is a pause in this while Ana is living in Nazareth, the story is often about Ana’s writing-she writes the stories of women in the Old Testament, of women she knows, of herself.
After this point, the story shifts to Nazareth where Ana and Yaltha live with Jesus’ family as he comes and goes, seeking out work in carpentry. Jesus rescues her from stoning in part because he claims that they are soon to be betrothed-a hint at where the story of Jesus’ rescue of the woman caught in adultery would have come from (John 8:2–11). She gets into some trouble and is accused of fornication. She is an upper-class, educated woman and her family arranges a marriage to an older man that is not at all to her liking. He comes in and out of the story because he is a Zealot, fighting against Rome. Her brother is Judas-technically the son of her mother’s cousin, but whose father had been killed and mother sold into slavery because of a Jewish uprising against Roman occupation in Sepphoris. She lives with her parents and her aunt, Yaltha, in Sepphoris. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder” (p. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth. The Book of Longings is about a woman named Ana who ends up married to Jesus. Though, really, it’s only the story of Ana, Jesus’ wife, that can be spoiled because I’m assuming that readers don’t need a spoiler alert that Jesus is crucified in the end. This book is about the recovering of the voices of women in a culture that hides them, and that idea was constantly on my mind as I read the book.Īnd, just as a warning: spoilers ahead. She explains in the readers guide in my edition, “I’d been exploring feminist theology for years and writing about silenced and marginalized women and the missing feminine within religion” (guide, p. I really enjoyed this book partly because of the connections that I made as I read to works of feminist biblical scholars-some of which I’m sure were an inspiration to Sue Monk Kidd since she has said that feminist theology was an inspiration to her in writing this book. This post is a review of the book based in part on the comments I made as part of the virtual book club. Toward the end of 2021 I participated in a virtual book club through my alma mater, Georgetown University, in which we read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings (Penguin Books, 2020).
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