Lilah

I came home from my last trip to the library with an armful of books based on Bible stories. I guess because it was close to Easter. This one was okay. I read the first book in the trilogy but I missed the second one. I don't think it mattered though; they're all about different women in the Old Testament. I didn't relate to Lilah very well and the ending left me outraged. I don't remember the lesser-known Old Testament stories very well, but did that really happen? I'm going to have to look it up. Anyway, the writing was a little weak. I wound up poring over the title page and publishing info to see if it had been translated from a different language.

397BC - my memory of history lessons of that time are pretty vague. It seems pogroms & massacres of all sorts went on then as they do now. Sections 1 & 2 are pretty much a love story/triangle - the 3rd part was in direct contrast. Bloody hateful stuff borne out of religious conformism. Fairly shocked me. Jews killing their wives and children who were not fully genetic Jews.

1 of 18 books for $10 today 5.12.2012

Liked the history, the picture of the time period. Did not like the woman written by a male author who didn't have the feel quite right. Or the plot that never came to a climax but just dwindled away in the end.

Disappointing

I was disappointed in this book. I read Sarah, and thought it was great. Zipporah was almost as good....this was not nearly as good. If you have read the other 2, you will probably want to read this, but if not....don't bother.

The story is loosely based on the book of Ezra. I'm not sure Lilah is actually mentioned in the Bible, and I can't find her. The book started out very slowly, got interesting enough to continue about halfway through, but had a sudden and horrible ending. Very unsatisfactory!

If this were submitted for a writing class and I was the instructor, I'd be handing it back with big red marks saying, "please try again Marek, I KNOW you can do better!"

This looked promising, but didn't work out. This belongs in the genre of feminist revision fiction (e.g. Red Tent) Jewish scripture O.T. themes. Lilah is the prophet Ezra's sister who returns with him to rebuild Jerusalem. They fall out over the issue of interacial marriage and she sides with the outcasts. I kept expecting Lilah's lover to appear back in the story.

This is not even close to being as good a read as the first two. I got the feeling that Mr Halter was just in hurry to finish writting his trialge. Its a shame really.