Book Review: Heretics Anonymous

 By Katie Henry

• Pub Date: 2018

• Genre: Young adult

• Where I bought this book: The Magic of Books, Seymour, Ind. 

• Why I bought this book: The title gave me a smile, and the bookstore was among the best on my recent bookstore crawl in Southern Indiana

• Bookmark used: Ordinary Equality: Unless all are equal none are equal   

 ***** 

    Katie Henry's debut novel is a light, fun and amusing tale of Catholic school kids who make friends, stir up trouble, fall in love, and try to make the world a better place.

    Michael Ausman is the new kid, a junior, on his first day at St. Clare's Preparatory School somewhere in suburbia (the book may have been more specific, but it really doesn't matter), and he's not happy.

    He's not a Catholic, not particularly religious, and doesn't believe in god. Moreover, he's pissed that he's moved schools for the fourth time, all because his overbearing father is ambitious, and thus Michael has spent a lifetime moving around, making and losing friends, and it's been getting harder and harder over the years. His goal for the first day is simple: To find someone to eat lunch with, so he doesn't have to sit alone in a high school cafeteria. 

    Miraculously, he does, and he soon finds himself in a small group of friends, all with some reason to find themselves not part of the big clique. Lucy is brilliant, devout, and a knowledgeable Catholic. Avi is Jewish -- and gay to boot. Eden has declared herself to be a Celtic Reconstruction Polytheist, who worships Brigit and other ancient Irish goddesses. Then there is Max, a Unitarian who makes bad jokes about his religion, and likes to wear cloaks, which are forbidden by the school's dress code.

    Eventually, they create a group for themselves they call Heretics Anonymous, so they can, among other things, surreptitiously attack the dress code. The story they tell told is funny -- hilarious at times -- and moving in a teenagery sort of way. 

    It also can be quite serious. The group really wants the entire school to change. They squirm under what they see as its oppressive Catholic structure, its hypocrisy, and its selective nature of enforcement. The writing here sometimes mocks Catholic traditions, sometimes gently, and sometimes with scathing denunciations. But included is a defense of some beliefs and works, and the notion that it doesn't always hold up its better ideals.

    The story is told by Michael, but the others get their time in the sun. Eden defends and explains why she thinks polytheism is more likely* than monotheism. Lucy consistently defends Catholic tenants and its god and saints, has read the Bible from cover to cover, and encourages discussion and debate in their theology classes. Her Christmas present for Michael is an annotated Bible, and he reads and learns from it.

    It's not exactly a defense of the religion, but does advise one to understand it. And while it can be serious at times, it's never heavy nor preachy.

----------------------------------

* And a better bet: "If monotheism's true, anyone who doesn't worship that one god is a sinner," Eden says. "If polytheism's true, then any god can be real. You don't have to worship them or think they're good, but they can still exist. I can believe that Brigit's real, and Athena's real, and so is Jesus." 

Book Review: Lilith

 By Nikki Marmery

• Pub Date: 2023

• Where I bought this book: Athena Books, Greenwich, Conn. 

• Why I bought this book: I am fascinated by the story of Lilith

 *********

    This is a forceful and furious retelling of the Hebrew myth of Lilith, the first woman of creation, who was banished for refusing to be subservient to Adam. She was tossed out of the Garden of Eden, removed from the Bible, and erased in history. But this evocative novel brings her back, in all her glory, anger, and wisdom.

    She spends her long life -- she has attained a humble immortality -- seeking to avenge the submission of women and trying to erase the monotheistic, patriarchal society set up by the male writers in the pages of the Torah and the Christian Bible.

    It's a majestic undertaking, rich in Biblical literature and the religious history of the Middle East. It features many of the characters we know from those Bible stories, including Noah and his ark, Jezebel and Simon Peter, and Mary Magdalene and Jesus; the latter two are called by their Aramaic names, Maryam and Yehuda. It re-introduces us to Asherah, the Hebrew goddess of Heaven and the wife of Yahweh, the god of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths.

    In addition to an imaginative and convincing novel, Marmery shows a comprehensive scholarship for the Biblical era. Her sourcing range is spectacular, from the study of Hebrew and Mesopotamian myths, to Syrian and Egyptian legends, to the Gnostic Gospels, to the history of the Middle East. The languages she studies and uses include Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

    Whenever I read one of these retold legends, I often wonder if the writer got things right. Of course, that's a silly thought, because all myths, even the originals, are essentially made up tales and the work of more than one person. But what I want to know is how closely does the retelling adhere to the original literature, and to the perceptions of the gods and goddesses.   

Collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art

A modern (1867) painting of Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel  

Rossetti, who portrays her as a vain seductress and a 

demonic killer of children,

    Marmery gets it right. Remember: It's not the story, but she who tells it. Marmery tells this one well, and it's as accurate a version as any out there.

    The original has Lilith present at the creation in the Garden of Eden. She was created along with Adam, the first man. But Lilith refused to lie under Adam -- and had already eaten from the Tree of Knowledge -- and was banished. God then created Eve from a rib of Adam, making her his child and wife. Thus, Adam becomes the father of all mankind, turning biology on its head, and ushering in an era of patriarchy that erases the power of women. All children come from Adam -- the mothers, if they are even mentioned, are often unnamed.

    So in this tale, Lilith sets out to retore Asherah to her rightful place as the Queen of Heaven. As Lilith seeks to find her prophet, she lives through the flood, descends into Sheol (the Hebrew underworld) to claim her lost son, walks with Jezebel and Mary Magdalene,  and learns about Jesus. In all cases, the story is a wee bit different from what we now accept.   

    Lilith is a thoughtful, knowledgeable woman, not the evil harpy often depicted. (Indeed, she sometimes is portrayed as the banshee in Irish myth, who cries out at death, and is seen as a harbinger of doom.) 

    Yes, she does question and fight, and ultimately rejects Yahweh as a conniving, vindictive, and vain god. She defends women and their rights to seek pleasure in mind and body. She does so in an effort to seek wisdom, balance, harmony, and the divinity of women. 

Book Review: The Gospel of Orla

 By Eoghan Walls

• Pub Date: 2023

• Where I bought this book: The Novel Neighbor, Saint Louis. 

• Why I bought this book: Jesus returns to a young Irish girl living in England.

*******  

    Orla is an unhappy 14-year-old. Her mother is dead. Her father is an alcoholic. School sucks. Her teachers suck. Her friends have deserted her. Her cat dies.

 

   Then, as she's planning to run away from home, she meets Jesus.

    Seriously. Not a pretend Jesus, but the Son of God, back to preach his father's word. But he's unsure how to go about it. 

    He's a little confused, roaming around parts of England, unsure of how he got there. He remembers being in Israel, dying, and lying around under the sea for a while. He knows the message he wants to spread -- peace and love and kindness -- and he thinks people will just follow him intuitively.

    He's unsure when he is. He hasn't heard of the internet, but becomes fascinated when Orla starts to teach him about wifi and Google maps. Cell phones are a mystery: He knows about phones, but thinks they are attached to walls. Personal hygiene is a concern -- he smells pretty rank, Orla says, and he thinks running around wearing only a blanket is an OK thing.

    Orla's a bit dubious about him, until she sees him bring a dead animal back to life. Then she decides she can use him to help her run away, and in return can teach him a thing or two about reaching out to people in modern times and on social media.

    The story ranges from Orla's plans, to her family life, to her days in school, to flashbacks about how her life got to the mess it is. Her tales of her time with Jesus are written in the style of the gospels, but with the voice of a teenage girl.  

 

    Walls is an Irish poet, and the prose often sings with a lyrical lilt. This is his first novel, and it's well done, with a fine story to go along with Orla's unique voice.

Book Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

 By Becky Chambers

• Pub Date: 2014

• Where I bought this book: Downbound Books, Cincinnati 

• Why I bought this book: My daughter highly recommends this writer

*******

   About halfway through reading this book, I had emergency gall bladder surgery. I tell you this because while drifting in and out of consciousness during recovery, I starting having some wild and colorful hallucinations, feeling that I was traveling through other dimensions of time and space. 

    It made me sort of leery about returning to the book, but also more appreciative of the images and descriptions in Chambers' writing.

    It's actually a fun book, an exploration of the foibles and frustrations of humans -- and to a larger extent, all sentient beings. It puts them together on a spaceship, The Wayfarer, tasked with punching wormholes to facilitate interspace travel. 

    It forces everyone -- humans, lizard-like beings, and assorted blobs and lobster-like and artificial intelligent beings -- together so that we rethink culture and thoughts and mores and idiosyncrasies.

    But like in all good worlds, love and appreciation of tea is a constant.

    The chapters and adventures are like episodic television, as the crew sets out on a mission to build new pathways through sometime hostile space frontiers, meeting and greeting other worlds and species. It's got science, excitement, danger, and hope for the future.

Book Review: The Wordy Shipmates

•  Author: Sarah Vowell
• Pub Date: 2008

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth, Norwood, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I heard the author on NPR once, and she seemed amazing 

*******

    You might not think that a history book exploring the lives of some of the earliest immigrants to the United States -- the somber Puritans who came to Boston in the 1600s because the religious figures in England were not strict enough -- would make for a witty, rollicking tale of adventure and petty in-fighting.

    But you would be wrong.

    Vowell's tale, complete with the letters and journals of the men -- and the few women -- who made an impact on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is a joy to read. It's history come alive, as reported by a somewhat snarky, knowledgeable reporter who, with a wry grin sadly shakes her head at the goings on.

    She brings in popular culture -- from the Brady Bunch to Bruce Springsteen, to Thanks, an oddball situation comedy that lasted six episodes in 1999 -- to help show how we've gotten it all wrong and entirely misunderstand the point of the first English colonists and their relationships with each other and the native culture. When one of them, John Winthrop, spoke about building a "city on a hill," they also missed the point, much like candidate Ronald Reagan misinterpreted Winthrop and Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. in 1984.    

In the U.S.A., we want to sing the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues.

      So, Vowell aims to set us straight. Chockful of primary sources, she covers the Puritans' voyage from their leaving of England in 1630 to their first years in what they called New England. The title is acknowledgement that the Puritans weren't stuffy, ignorant people, (well, they tended to be stuffy, but ...) but serious men and women who knew their religion, had a specific interpretation of their Bible, and could argue and explain exactly what they wanted and why. Along with fighting evil and burning Indians, they wrote and collected books and created colleges of learning.

    And they did it their way.

Book Review: Haven

 

•  Author: Emma Donoghue

• Where I bought this book: The Strand, New York City. 

• Why I bought this book:  Donoghue is one of my favorite writers, and this is her latest.

********

    This slow, meandering narrative is like taking a trip down the Shannon River sometime in the Seventh Century.

    It's a meaningful ride, one of compelling stories and heartbreak, of questions of life and immortality, of whether being alone is the same as loneliness.  

    It tells of Irish history, both physical and spiritual. It tells of Christian ideology, or the desire to please that version of  god above all else, whatever that may mean. 

    It begin when Artt, a monk at a monastery on the western coast of Ireland, has a vision of himself and two other men  finding a more isolated location to better worship God. Artt feels the current monastery has too many comforts -- regular meals, a warm place to sleep, and music during the evening hours. But Artt fervently believes that only by suffering and fending for themselves -- and above all putting God at the center of their lives -- could they properly honor his will.

    So he gathers Trian, a naïve young man, and Cormac, who came to the monastery late in life, after his family died in a plague, and the trio sets off to find an isolated rock on Ireland's Atlantic coast.

    The novel continues its slow journey, as the men find Skellig Michael -- an actual place eight miles off the coast of County Kerry that was founded by monks sometime in the latter part of the First Millennium. It is what Artt wants, set off from human habitation, a windswept, rocky land that would focus their minds on worshipping, honoring, and praising God.

    The basics of this story are real. Skellig Michael, now a tourist attraction, is lonely, cold, and hard to get to. Evidence shows that monks did arrive there more than a thousand years ago, built some stone structures and attempted to open a monastery so they could worship the Christian God more than life itself.

    You know, I get the desire to live alone, on some forgotten -- or as yet unknown -- part of the world. And while it's not for me, I get the dream of making a life on one's own, to be self-sufficient, to live among nature, and to sleep under the stars. 

    But what I don't understand is the need to welcome -- even to seek -- pain and suffering and deprivation to ensure your devotion is real. Artt insists that his monks should serve their God first and foremost, and thus building shrines and worship centers must take precedence over finding shelter and supplies.

    Artt wants the days to be spent honoring God, which includes copying out, by hand, the words of the sacred text. And to do this means creating the paper, ink, and writing materials, instead of finding food, water, and other necessities of life. Artt nixes that, saying only that God will provide. To doubt that is to doubt God.

    Donoghue explores the questions of what is love and survival. She blends the aspirations of Trian and Cormac to serve God and keep their vow to obey and follow Artt despite his  contentions that God wants them to suffer while doing so.

    Artt sees their human needs as selfish, while they come to see his philosophy of God as rather pointless.