Book Review: From the lands of ancient Ur comes a story of an amazing woman. A woman who's beauty was unrivaled, who became the mother of a civilization so great its numbers rival the grains of sand. A woman who went from the palaces of her pagan childhood to the tents of the beduin people; those who followed the One True God.
In Sarah Halter takes us in the footsteps of an amazing woman in Biblical History, Sarah wife of Abraham. But before she was Sarah, she was Sarai, "born in a house with thirty rooms in a city that contained a hundred similar houses, its most beautiful temple as high as the hill of Qiryat-Arba, its outer walls thicker than an ox."
Our Bible characters, are sometimes without faces; without personalities. They are the people who were inspired by God. This book brought this most mysterious of women to my attention... She was more than Abraham's wife, she was more than 'the woman who was barren but God healed'; in this books Halter brings her to life. Her fears, her desires, her destiny are all alive and shining with the brilliance of God's plan for her life. A truly worthy read!
Book Synopsis: Yet another entry in the burgeoning subgenre of fictional portraits of biblical women (see, for example, Rebecca Kohn's retelling of the story of Queen Esther in The Gilded Chamber), Halter's novel (the first in a trilogy) adheres to a by now familiar formula: frank sexual and emotional revelations presented against a backdrop of burnished interiors. Halter's Sarah is born Sarai, the daughter of one of the most powerful lords of Ur.
At the age of 12, she is pledged in marriage to a man she has never met, and despite the finery of her bridal chamber ("Everything was new.... Linen rakutus as smooth as a baby's skin"), she flees in distress. Dragged back to her father's house, she doses herself with an herbal concoction that leaves her barren and is made a priestess of Ishtar, Ur's goddess of war. Six years later, an encounter with her childhood love, the handsome Abram, furnishes her with the chance she's been waiting for: she escapes with him and joins his nomadic tribe.
Her contentment is short-lived, because Abram is called by God to leave his tribe and set out for a new land, whereupon the familiar (but freely adapted) Bible story unfolds. The misery Sarah feels at being barren, the indecent love her nephew Lot expresses for her, her encounter with Pharaoh and her quarrel with Hagar, the slave woman who gives Abram a child, shape the novel's second half. Halter isn't afraid to present headstrong Sarah as bitter in her old age, and his complex portrait of the biblical matriarch gives this solid if predictable novel a dash of freshness.
Synopsis Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.com
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