Curious if anyone else has read this book? I saw it on a table at a bookstore and was excited to read a novel that would challenge the dogma of Christianity.
Lilith - the first woman. Rebel, goddess, mythological feminist icon. In this book, though? Passive, bland, and ignorant. I wanted to see a strong woman who refused to be submissive to men. Instead I got a confused leaf in the wind, barely taking any action throughout the whole book.
I don’t want to rip too hard into the book. Obviously, writing a book and having it published is a huge accomplishment. But I found myself skipping entire pages to just get to the end of the book.
Interested in hearing the thoughts of others if they read this book. Maybe I’m just not looking at it from the right perspective.
For want of a less ironic word: hubris.
‘This book will challenge the dogma of [insert cultural tradition]’ is a claim that can only fail. You can critique, create a parody of or out right mock a set of beliefs. You seriously have your work cut out to challenge it in a meaningful way and your material needs to be better known for your novel to make any difference.
Particularly in this case, people lose sight of the shear breadth of Christian thought and belief. The source material for this book are The Books of Enoch’. They are wierder than Revalations, Daniel and Ezekiel put together. For the Ethiopian Orthodox, they are canonical and for many other branches they don’t even count as Apocrypha. I suspect most Evangelicals have never heard of them, or of Lilith for that matter.
How The Whale Became (Ted Hughes) probably had more impact.