The Chronicles of Noah and Her Sisters: Genesis and Exodus According to Women

Rating:
Summary: Devout Christians and Jews will be disappointed
Review: I can't imagine any believer in the Lord God would derive the least bit of spiritual insight from this book; moreover, the writing is so flat and uninteresting that the books fails as a work of speculative fiction. The author makes it seem like she's merely retelling Pentateuch stories from the women's point of view, but what she's actually doing is imposing her own contemporary feminist beliefs on these women; so, instead of following the One True God, these women engage in such heresies as goddess worship and other idolatry, and constantly refer to the Lord as "Godde" and "S/HE." Readers of the Bible know there's a lot of violence, pettiness and sinfulness on the part of the men and women in Genesis and Exodus, but the author smooths all this out and non-judgmentally makes all the women seem like a bunch of cozy, wise, loving sisters. As a Christian woman, I'm all for trying to better understand the matriarchs in the Bible, but this ultra-feminist blather is neither insightful nor scholarly (it's particularly annoying not to have the original Bible texts, or at least the chapter and verse citations, printed in an appendix), and overall the book was a waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: A new look at old stories
Review: This book brought alive stories I have heard from my childhood and challenged me to read the stories for myself with new eyes. There are subtleties and undercurrents in the stories that I had not seen before. The book also reminded me that these were oral tales, told and retold with infinite variety long before they were written down.