The Book of Longings takes its reader from Galilee to Egypt, back and forth, throughout its narrative arc. And, unlike the Christian narratives that focus on Christ and his disciples, The Book of Longings is Ana’s story and it continues long after Jesus dies on the cross. Sue Monk Kidd conceives of a Jesus, a Judas, a Mary who certainly occupy their traditional roles in the Christian convention, but whose stories are more complicated, more rooted in humanity perhaps, than what the four canonical gospels portray. Even as the book leads the reader to his inevitable crucifixion and its consequent results, The Book of Longings stays on the margins of the Christian narrative as presented in the Gospels of the New Testament. Everything the reader sees of Jesus is through Ana’s gaze, her perspective. We meet his family and witness his revolutionary, messianic calling. The Book of Longings presents its readers with a very human Jesus in early adulthood. In the fray of the moment, Ana connects with a young man named Jesus here her path diverges from the life her parents envision and labor towards. But unsurprisingly her family has other plans for her, and Ana’s path takes her to a crowded marketplace to meet her betrothed, a man selected by her father for his wealth and connections. Ana’s voice, her written word, become her prayer and her singular focus as a young woman. In foil to Ana’s tradition- and power-loving parents, her Aunt Yaltha, of whom Ana had known nothing prior, appears one day from Egypt and continues to enlarge Ana’s world view. She masterfully reads and writes in multiple languages by her teens (the time at which the novel opens). Ana, however, receives a gift from her otherwise traditional father: the gift of literacy. She comes of age in a world of strict social and class roles, rigid along gender lines, in Sepphoris of Galilee in the early years of Common Era. Ana, from whose first-person perspective the story unfolds, is the daughter of the local regent’s head scribe. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings (2020) presents a beautiful, and at times raw, look at the life of women in first century Israel and Egypt.
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