Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic - I finished it in 2 days!
Review: I loved this book. It was absolutely thrilling to read this modern midrash (interpretation) on Sarah's story. How wonderful it was to hear Sarah's voice emerge from the text. I thought the book was well researched and I found the author's deviations from the biblical text to be fascinating. I finished this 390 page book (hardcover) in 2 days and it was a pleasure! I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: You'll fall in love with Sarah
Review: After reading Stone Tables, I was looking forward to Sarah's story as told by Orson Scott Card. I was not disappointed. From the very beginning of the book, Sarah is a deep and complex girl who believes in the God of Israel. The rest of the book serves to develop her character even more and settle her deeper and deeper into our hearts. She marries Abraham, and subsequently they travel into Egypt, as recorded in the Bible. I loved OSC's interpretation of the scriptural account and was grateful that he took the risk to add some details. The dialogue, especially between Sarah and Abraham, is brilliant and true to life. OSC is adept in his understanding of human nature and this is very evident in this work.As in Stone Tables, I was pleased with the outcome, the overall presentation of the characters, and the resolution of the story.
Rating: 
Summary: A Swift Read
Review: Orson Scott Card has not written the most profound of novels but he does create a multi-layered and complex character in Sarah. He shows her conflicting emotions and allows the reader inside the mind of a fascinating, yet elusive personality from the Bible. This is an easy read and very enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: I'm very sleepy
Review: Why am I sleepy? Not because this book was boring, because I couldn't put it down. I had to stay up until 2am to finish it. This book humanizes the great patriarch and his wife, without defiling his great faith and works. I found the stories in this book very plausible and quite well crafted. The tender and playful relationship between Abraham and Sarah rings true to human experience. The human flaws and mistakes that some bible zealots would find blasphemous, serve to show the great faith that the two had, and the dependence that everyman has on a supporting faithful wife. I honestly can't wait to read Rebecca. Well Done Orson, Ender should be jealous.
Rating: 
Summary: All of Card's empathy, none of his great stories.
Review: Not surprisingly, this book had all the incredible characterization and empathy and human complexity that Card is so good at. Also not surprisingly, there's none of the incredible premises, settings, or plots that he is alos incredibly good at. He makes the biblical story human, but not terribly interesting. And Abraham has the same problem that a lot of his major characters do, he's never uncertian and never wrong in his infinite wisdom. That gets old. In general this was one of my least favorite Card books, but if you love the humanity in his writing more than the creativity, you'll love this.
Rating:
Summary: Not your dad's Bible
Review: "Sarah" sets out to take the light sketch of Abraham's wife in the Bible and extend it into a full novel telling much of her life's story from her point of view. If "Sarah" is any clue, OS Card set out with the "Women of Genesis" series to loft a feminist retake on the biblical story of the patriarchs: What were the wives of these great prophets up to? Why do they, despite sparing reference in the Bible, get a lot more attention than almost any other women in the male-dominated scriptures? Could it be because they were as intelligent, brave, righteous, and powerful in their service to the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," just as much as their famous, credit-hogging husbands? Sarah turns out to qualify, not just as a co-equal with the revered Abraham, but his indispensable support without whom he could not have lived up to greatness. In keeping with this 20th-century revision of 4,000-year-old nomadic culture, Sarah is also outspoken and liberated, with Abraham not batting an eye, as both of them talk like modern Americans. Those easily offended at irreverent takes on revered religious figures will not appreciate Abraham teasing the aging Sarah about her saggy breasts, though those offended by religious stuffiness will have a ball with the refreshingly human portrayals. Nor will purists of the historical novel appreciate the dialog, though the author has made a genuine effort to depict an accurate milieu of nomadic life. Actually, since depicting ancient culture really accurately is ultimately an intractable challenge, substituting the audience's culture into the unknowns makes as much sense for the story as anything. Purists of whatever flavor of orthodox Biblical interpretation are also bound to get riled, not least by the substitution of less miraculous replacements for the brimstone from heaven and the punishment by transformation into a pillar of salt. Card also sneaks in a few Mormon conceits hinting at the Book of Enoch, and the Pharaoh's sacred rituals as an apostate form of the real temple ceremonies. Although "Sarah" functions admirably as a distant prequel to Card's fantastic "Stone Tables" (the story of Moses), I started losing patience with Sarah and Abraham at the same time Pharaoh was losing patience with them in the story. Although it starts out in characteristic Card form with appealing character development as Sarah learns of Abraham and they launch off on their adventure together, my credibility was stretched by the summary execution with which their romance together was dispensed. As the story continues, it started to dawn on me that Sarah and Abraham are both a little too confident in their righteousness for much doubt to remain as to where the story is going. After all, we have read this story before; the devil has got to be in the details; but the details are filled only with God. This ideal faith leaves little to be resolved. Although Hagar is introduced as interestingly tragic, and her talent for frank analogies to bedchambers endears her, the following setup explaining the biblical story of Abraham fathering a child with her is too pat, and the pain it inflicts on Sarah too tidy. Worse, Hagar's character is disingenuously contorted to fit the artificial demands of the new plot, going from sympathetic up until the impregnation to repulsive, redemptionless witch afterward. This uncomfortable pattern is repeated with Sarah's sister, who marries Lot and is also tagged with a "rejected-by-God" sign on her back that apparently requires the story to turn her into a shrill, putrid scab of a human being to get us to understand that it was really for the best for God to wipe her out. I can understand giving more background to show a God who reserved punishment for more than just a minor infraction like looking back homeward after he said not to, but a dumpster-full of justification was served where a single pie would have done nicely. The same goes for the general population of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose depiction was ripped out of the Clockwork Orange complemented by a genuinely hostile commentary on homosexuality, coming from a writer with a stable-full of sympathetic gay characters in earlier novels. That combined with the heavily slanted depiction of the Isaac Versus Ishmael story as backdrop for the next four thousand years and counting of Jew Versus Arab conflict, will potentially put off a significant slice of potential readers who do not share with the author his professed admiration for the Fox News Channel worldview. Despite its flaws, "Sarah" remains at least serviceable and often compelling, as an exercise in historical and religious revisionism. The dependable Card trademarks of compelling character-driven storytelling and insightful moral and psychological exploration are still here to merit a four-star rating. But don't go away - the series takes a huge leap forward in Part Deux with "Rebekah." I've noticed the Amazon sales rank is lower for "Rebekah" than for "Sarah," suggesting there are lots of you out there doing what I almost did and foregoing the second installment due to less-than-expected delicious Card storytelling in the first. But if you at all enjoyed this one, the best is yet to come.
Rating:
Summary: Loved this book
Review: The title says it all. If you liked "The Red Tent", then you should read this book. I read this after "Ender's Game" and I enjoy his writing...My 13 year old just finished
"Ender's Game" and loved it...I am going to try to get him to read this too!
Rating:
Summary: One Woman's Roar
Review: Sarai, later to become Sarah, is a character who can help women who are both intellectually and emotionally gifted see all that a woman can be with faith in herself and faith in her God. Although she begins as the profound woman behind the man/prophet, she shows herself to be a person in her own right because she can deal compassionately with people at all positions in life. She can do this because she is insightful and honest, above all else. Sometimes she is so honest and so unself-serving, that others are able to take advantage of her goodnesses and able to cast her in a bad light. But, she sticks with her beliefs and her personal ethics and the truth, and she overcomes all to remain admired and respected. Throughout the story, the reader ached for her barrenness and for the slights she suffered at the hands of maid, Hagar, and at the words of her own sister who can conceive but only daughters. Nonetheless, Sarai holds to her path and remains true to her love for Abram and her to hope that she shall conceive a son, all the while fighting off the belief that she is being punished for marrying in the first place. In her later years she gives up her hope to bear a child and comes up with an alternate, perhaps unwise, solution. Abram in old age gets the vision for her to become Sarah and for him to become Abraham, she laughts at the notion that her womb can still carry a child. They are old, and realistically she cannot AND he cannot... Yet, the miraculous brings them Isaac. From here we follow the path of a cautions and protective mother. He is the heir, and he has threats to his life and his future at the hands of Hagar's, the maid's, son conceived with Abram. Sarah lives to be 90 and to follow her son into manhood. She even teaches her prophet husband to see past, through, and into a situation before he judges. Even those who betray her, she understands their motives and refuses to hate them. Living in her head in this novel and being witness to the logic of her hopes, fears, and comprehension of the world in which she lives should earn her the respect of any reader. This is written in the usual intellectual style of Card, a cannot-putter-downer!
Rating:
Summary: Fraught with small problems.
Review: I wish I could give this three and a half stars, because it's still Card, and Card is still brilliant. Two factors make it less than it could be, though, and one of them is troubling. First, he doesn't have a lot to work with and, trying to be too faithful perhaps, he doesn't stray very far from the story he's been handed in order to make it any better. The result is a plotline too thin to make an entire novel, and characters who are sometimes choppy and disconnected -- neither of these is an issue in the original Genesis, because the story as told is short and in disjointed pieces, but when you keep those factors and try to novelize the tale it just doesn't work completely. The more upsetting problem is exactly what story Card considers himself to have been handed. The book is being advertised as about the Sarah of Genesis, but it includes many events which are flat-out not told in Genesis, some contradictory to the conventional interpretation of Genesis, and only available in the Mormon tradition's private view of Sarah's story. This would not be a problem if it were marketed as a Mormon view of Sarah but it is not. It is marketed as a Biblical view of Sarah, which it most emphatically isn't, and Card gets sloppy in some really obvious ways -- for instance, making Sarah at one point go down on her knees to pray. Israelites, from Abraham's time on, NEVER prayed on their knees; that is a Christian and not a Hebrew custom. That a Mormon author raised within a Christian country might reflexively consider it the way to pray is understandable; that he was so serene in his own tradition's distortions of the Biblical story that he did not even bother to research the customs of the time is frankly offensive.
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT!
Review: This was both fun and historical reading. Using factual names of characters, places and cultural events, Card created an amusing work of fiction that echos great importance. Everyone should read this for both Card's creative ingenius and crafty storytelling...as well as for it's spiritual significance.
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