Rating: 
Summary: Sorry I bought this one -
Review: I was completely surprised that the author, an alleged expert on Judaism, chose to ignore the basic theme of the Bible while telling her story of the women of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the story of one God and His people. The author chooses to ceaselessly glorify the most disgusting pagan rituals while inaccurately retelling the story that is in the Bible. For example, Abram and Sarah were told by the Lord - NOT by some goddess - that they would bear a son. The Bible says that Joseph did NOT sleep with Potiphar's wife, and on and on with the distortions. To "flesh out" the Biblical characters and give them dialogue and a storyline is well and good Why did the author consistently change the story as found in the Bible - for what purpose? The many errors in the Biblical story plus the endless goddess worship that the author seems so enamored of, made this a book I was glad to be finally finished with. I think historical fiction should try to accurately portray the subject, not re-write it. The idea of women bonding, as I am sure they did, within the red tent and in their lives was an idea worthy of a book. The end result was a huge disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: The story was interesting but the writing lacked depth and creativity. A predictable list of Dinah's life events.
Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical, engaging book
Review: For a long time, I passed by The Red Tent on the store bookshelves, since I tend to like contemporary fiction, and also since I don't have a thorough knowledge of the Bible. Finally, though, I heard enough positive reviews that I read it.It was engaging on many levels. The language was lyrical, and the stories told by Dinah were captivating, thought provoking, and sometimes quite humorous. That these were historical stories only added to the richness of the book. Despite the undeniable difficulty of their lives, the care that the women took toward each other, and their rejoicing in the cycles of women's bodies (and lives) is something to embrace in the present day. The Red Tent can be read, enjoyed and remembered regardless of your religious affiliation or what you remember from Sunday School.
Rating:
Summary: How did Oprah miss this one?
Review: If I died tomorrow, I'd be satisfied with the Red Tent being the last literary piece of material to have crossed my eyes, imagination and soul. Dinah (Anita Diamant) says/writes a little about death and love in the end of this novel - basically, there is no shame in death, it would only be a shame to not have read this book before that circumstance befalls you.
Rating:
Summary: Don't delay -- read this!
Review: If you desire to be moved deeply and feel connected to the history of life through our female ancestors, read this book without delay. Be prepared to go on many journeys from the spiritual to the emotional to the visualization of ancient sights and sounds. I marvel at this book and how it's affected me by giving me strength. This is a midrash tale full of wonder and delight.
Rating:
Summary: Not What I Expected.
Review: In a sense, a biblical novel is a historical novel. The writer must not inject her own theories that run perpendicular to the grain of history or to the Scriptures. A writer of an American Civil War history, for instance, would be doing his readers and history itself a great injustice if he portrayed Abe Lincoln as a pacifist. The Red Tent does just this sort of thing. Joseph married and had two sons, both blessed by Jacob and both becoming patriarchs to a half-tribe of Israel. He was a heterosexual, but Ms. Diamant portrays Joseph as a homosexual. This is not only historically innacurate but offensive to Conservative Jews and to others who take the Torah seriously. Not only is the book not based on good history or the Scripture, it is not a very well written book-- quite boring in fact. I give it one star because the cover illustration is beautiful.
Rating:
Summary: Startling myth
Review: I found this book fascinating. The cultural details were wonderful--I found the lack of any clear dividing line between our traditional understanding of early Hebrew peoples and what a religious person might call pagan roots very thought-provoking. My book club rushed to the Bible to see what was said there about these characters. The power and mystery of these women was amazing--it made me think about how much women lost by being in a nuclear family in the Western sense in the last couple of hundred years, rather than part of large extended groups of mothers, cousins, daughters, servants--something only partly regained as women have fought for eqality in the modern age.
Rating:
Summary: Please rewrite the rest of Genesis for us, Ms. Diamant!
Review: Although you don't have to be familiar with the Old Testament to reap the rich rewards in The Red Tent, it certainly provides an interesting counterpoint to the tale. (The tale can be read from Genesis 25:19 to Genesis 35). What is so rich about The Red Tent is its perspective, precisely, that of Dinah's--a woman before the God of Abraham was the only God around. Indeed, the women of this story have their own gods, their own traditions, their own stories. The power of this book lies in the depth of the storytelling; it is alive, captivating, and rich in the wisdom of women. Take, for instance, this quote where Dinah's mother explains a mysyery to her: "The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to women that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon's birth--to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. they imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them. "In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleasning the body of last month's death, preparing the body to receive the new month's life, women give thanks--for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes between our legs, and that life costs blood." I always appreciate a novel that deepens your own perspective, one that calls forth in our own lives a fuller response to the events of our lives. The Red Tent is such a book. I am certain now that when my own daughters come of age, their will be a ceremony for them that expresses their own connection to the great mother Earth, and her sister the moon. But do not think that this is just a coming of age story for women, because it is not. It is a story woven with the threads of birth and death, love and agony, connectedness and solitude. And its culmination, its last breath, is a glorious sunset of wisdom and words.
Rating:
Summary: I didn't want to stop reading it
Review: Putting my thoughts about this book into words is quite difficult, but suffice to say that this a riveting, beautifully written story that I did not want to stop reading. Her prose is very compelling, and amazingly economical - I don't know if she normally writes this way, but I found the economy of words to also help transport me to the barreness of the desert in whcih the story takes place. As a book this is just plain wonderful writing that anyone would greatly enjoy experiencing. However, since this is a story of Dinah, a Biblical character, one must also rate this book as a part of the religious tradition, and in that regard, I feel that it works beautifully. Dinah is mentioned but once in the long story of Jacob in Genesis, and her story deserves to be told. Obviously, this is a work of fiction, and is not to be taken as canonical. Dinah's story comes so alive, though, and fills in so much of what is missing from the Bible story (and what is missing in the Bible is the story of the women - interesting how their stories seemingly disappeared over time...). Obviously, also, the religious zealots out there will take issue with this book because they tend to take issue with anything that might challenge their thoughts and cause them to think differently about what might have happened 3500 years ago. While I am sure the Bible is a fairly accurate record of many things that happened, I am sure that in the small details, it has been embellished (or changed through copying errors) in the 3500 years this story has been passed on. Diamant's representation of Jacob and his sons as very human with very human needs/foibles was a welcome take on the typical superman-like representations of these guys. I don' think that Diamant has re-written the Biblical story, but she has taken all those holes and unsaid things, and filled them in with narrative of what might have been, and certainly could have been. What is so compelling for me in the story, besides my absolute fascination with lives in Canaanite and pre-Canaanite times, is the story of women - not just of the women in the story, but this really becomes a story of what it was like to be a woman in that era, when countless gods were worshiped, when nature was something to pay attention to, when childbirth was more dangerous and natural, in a fairly nomadic and earth-based style of living. In the red tent, the gathering place of Rachel and Leah and the other women for the three days every month, the stories of the women were passed from one generation to the next; the women were free to be truly female, and to talk about their own fears and joys as they celebrate together the constant ebb and flow of life/death/rebirth. Dinah becomes a mid-wife, and a darn good one, and Diamant has gorgeous writing about the delivering of babies - the pain, the mess, the screaming, the joy of new babies, and the sorrow of babies delivered dead, and of mothers who die in childbirth. And yet life goes on, as it always does, and people move on. The red tent, in the book, becomes of the symbol (for us) of what can happen if women have a place to share and be safe, and celebrate their bodies with one another - directly opposed to what we have today, I believe, in which women don't have chance or or not allowed or simply don't feel like sharing, caring, and celebrating the gift of life-giving which they carry in them. I hope this book will serve to drive a new direction, perhaps especially within the chruch, in which women can be free to truly talk about and celebrate and not have to be ashamed about their menstruation, and in which, perhaps, the lives of girls can be celebrated as they enter into womanhood. I also love all the twists and turns that the plot takes - the book concentrates on Dinah, of course, but after she leaves Jacob's tribe, her life comes into contact with the tribe or peolpe she knew before. So we get Dniah's story for a while, and then a retelling of a situation that is in the Biblical story. I hope that we will have more books about the lives of the women in the Bible. Certainly their stories were told at one time - Phyllis Trible taught us that in seminary - and it would be nice to reclaim them from the male-dominated society that slowly wiped those stories out, or didn't feel them sufficiently important to include.
Rating:
Summary: What an interesting read...
Review: I love historical fiction and read this book with some trepidation of how religious it might be, but you can practice any religion and read it as it is written, a fable describing the times from a woman's point of view. I completely fell into this book and could not put it down, I had to know what happened next. It describes a time when it seemed that women were respected for their womanhood, for their wisdom, and their contributions to the (extremely) extended family, but then again they weren't, in the sense that they still had to succumb to the husband's wishes. I also reveled in the thought of having my own "Red Tent" where I could lounge and party for three days during "that time" instead of having to go on like some warrior and pretend I am not uncomfortable. All said, I recommend this book to every woman, it may give you an insight into how the times have changed, and how they remain the same, over 2,000 years later.
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