Beautiful, tender, and sweet.

Telling this story in the first person was a bold move, but it gives us a taste of what life may have been like for Christ: fully man with all the temptations, pains, and difficulties that brings, yet sinless in their midst; and fully God--powerful and strong, yet gentle and compassionate.

Especially poignant, heartbreaking even, were the scenes involving Avigail. The baptism of Christ in the Jordan and his temptation by Satan in the wilderness were wonderful passages as well.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and at just 242 pages, the story flies by.

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Anne Rice is my favorite author, but this is my least enjoyable book from her. I get that she's rediscovered the church and writing about the life of Christ is her new calling, but I just loved her vampire novels so much it's hard for me to accept this new Anne Rice.
It isn't just the fact that it isn't vampires anymore. I really just didn't enjoy the writing. There were only a few moments in the book where the story grabbed me. I had a hard time following all the characters or even caring about them.
I felt this book bordered on silly and at times disturbing. While I respect Rice for being so creative by filling in Biblical gaps with dialog and other details, I was bothered by the relationship of Yeshua and Avigail. I guess I'm not used to the idea of Jesus maybe being in love or the idea of having a woman yell out to him "Let me be your whore".
From other reviews I read, others say she was pretty right on with the details as we know them, but I'm not familiar with such exact details of the Bible. I just know the basics. All I really know is I didn't enjoy this book very much, and I'm sad because I feel I've lost my favorite author.

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This book starts out slower than the 1st one, but it ends up being just as good. These books made me think in new ways about the life of Jesus, both inside and outside of the Bible.

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"The Road to Cana" is the second volume of Anne Rice's trilogy about the life of Christ.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as the earlier volume, but it was still a good read. Like many other Christians, Catholic and Protestant, Rice is enamored with the notion of Jesus as God Incarnate, emphasizing his divine nature over his human nature. She makes nods to his human longings -- the love he feels for a woman he knows, his desire to be alone for a while -- but far and away, the theme she keeps returning to is Jesus as God-who-chooses-to-be-finite. By the end of the book, Jesus is just oozing omniscience at will, eavesdropping on events, hearing the voices of everyone in the world, and seeing everything going on around him.

That's not my christology, but it's not my book either. If her Jesus becomes less interesting to me as the book goes on, her other characters remain fascinating to the end. There is the tension and anger between Jesus and his older brother, James; the simmering frustration of a rabbi who feels that Jesus has wasted himself as a carpenter; the delicate choreography his neighbors dance through when they ask him to pray; and, at times, the helplessness Jesus feels when things go awry.

"Out of Egypt" moved the young Jesus through the backdrop of history, as the Holy Family returned to Galilee from Alexandria just after the death of Herod the Great, and it was punctuated by the burning of Sepphoris and other moments recorded by Josephus and other ancient historians.

That continues here; as someone who has read extensively about ancient Rome and how the Judean and Galileean countrysides fared under the Caesars and under Pilate, and how the rumbles of politics in Rome made themselves felt across the Mediterranean, it's interesting to see how those things play out in Rice's imagining.

I've enjoyed seeing how the people in Galilee feel the shadow of Sejanus, witnessing the generational conflict over how to handle Pilate's legions and their ensigns when they come to Jerusalem, and all the other events that take place on the edges of Jesus' life.

Rice's "Christ the Lord" trilogy is the second fictionalized treatment of the gospels that I can recall reading. It's been worth the time to read.

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Beautifully written. Hard to believe this came from the same author that gave us The Vampire Chronicles and the VERY adult Slepping Beauty series (under the pseudonym of A.N. Roquelaure).

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