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What if Jesus married The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With At A Party from SNL.

This book answers that burning question. And the answer is . . . nothing. A whole lot of nothing. Nothing would have happened if Jesus married the girl you wish you hadn't started a conversation with at a party.

Don't get me wrong, as a woman myself, I tend to agree with most of the themes and mores about women's rights that I found myself being beaten over the head with in this book. However, much of it was wildly unbelievable for what a woman of the time would want and push for and took me completely out of the story. Many of the events didn't seem organic, but forced to push a message, without subtility or art.

Anna is an annoying, whiney, self-righteous feminist taken directly from the 21st century CE and plopped into a 1st century CE setting. She is, I suspect, a bit of a self-insert by the author. She is raised in a very privileged way her whole life, given access to things that few girls were in that time, but still treats her parents like absolute garbage. Do they seem like nice people? Not really, but in a way that is unconvincing, they are just villains because it's convenient for the author and serves her purpose.

The dialogue and much of the flowery prose is cringe-worthy. Kidd uses phrasing at times that makes you feel ill and brings up long-suppressed memories of Twilight.

Anna finally ends up living among poor people when she marries Jesus. Here we encounter the magical goat Delilah. Somehow she is always milking Delilah, but Delilah never has kids that are mentioned, so how is she constantly producing milk? Also, she is apparently still alive at the time of Jesus' death. Goat life span is at most 18 years, and such an extended lifespan would have been highly unlikely in 30 CE without access to a veterinarian. During her time with poor people Anna finally goes through some character development, sort of. She is still self-absorbed and everyone who criticizes her is seen as evil.

Lets also talk about Yaltha, Anna's manipulative aunt. Yaltha wants Anna to live the life she missed out on, so she constantly manipulates Anna to believe certain things and act certain ways. This is most creepy when she convinces Anna not to pursue pregnancy again after a heartbreaking stillbirth, where afterward Anna expresses a desire to perhaps pursue motherhood with another pregnancy. But no, Yaltha says Anna has a higher calling and discourages her in trying again. How fucked is that? If Anna wants to have another baby, how about we let her make that choice? It seemed like one of the few times when the character was developing and making a choice on her own, but nope. Can't have that.

Anna continues to be a defiant, fierce womyn for the rest of the novel until, strangely enough, when she encounters Jesus carrying his cross to his crucification. Suddenly she becomes meek and powerless and whispering encouragement to him as he marches to his execution. This seemed completely out of character based on how she had been portrayed the rest of the novel. She would have stood up for anyone else, she was more upset about her magical goat getting traded than her husband getting murdered by the authorities. Perhaps this is due to him being a male, and thus his life not being worth saving. I don't know.

Wouldn't recommend unless you're really into mom group book club fiction.

An extended prologue suffering from torturous plotlessness.

2/22/23. I just wanted to edit to add: if you are looking for a book that captures the ugliness, the complexity, the devastation, the beauty, and the horror of life for many millions of people in India, I have found no work better than Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers". Read that. Not this.

Back to my review:
Listened to this book on audible. Let me first say that this narrator is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I would listen to anything he narrates, really. 

In 2007, 2008, and 2009 I spent a total of 8 months in India, primarily in New Delhi, though I traveled a bit. This book was engaging for me from the beginning because it brought back memories of the horrors and ruthlessness that I witnessed there. The characters were familiar and well-written, overall, if a little one-dimensional. 

I'm going to disagree with a lot of reviewers who really like Ajay's opening 200 or so pages. This was a slow, passive slog. It was just extended backstory. Ajay himself is a character without agency who doesn't seem to develop as the backstory drags on.

Neda's portion was a little more interesting because she at least has a little agency in the world. I think Neda was a well-done character, realistic, with a lot of believable, annoying flaws. She reminds me of the classic shtick of many of the young women I met in Delhi during those years. Eventually her story got a little blah too. I think at one point I accidentally moved the dial back an hour and found myself listening to something I had already heard. But rather than thinking I had accidentally jumped backward I actually thought the author was going over the same things again later in the story, as the character reflected on what happened, because this would not have been in anyway outside her established patterns as a writer to this point. 

We finally switch to Sunny, who's a total whiner, but has more agency than all the other characters and actually does things. The story starts at last (I think I was about 12 hours in at 1.3x at this point) and I was engaged and excited. Then the finally present story comes to a SCREECHING halt so we can listen to some rando bad guy that has just appeared--apropos of nothing--give a 2 hour monologue (no joke, at 1.3x speed). I almost stopped entirely and gave up. 

That monologue really ruined the rest of the book for me. I no longer cared about the brief "story" that had finally started, the characters, the outcome. All credibility the author had gained in the brief moments of brilliance were utterly shattered. Not sure if Penguin Random House had to cut all their editors due to the pandemic or what. I will not be buying the sequels. There are flashes of brilliance in the story (hence 2 stars) but that accounts for about 2 hours, the rest is a dragging, monotonous slog, going nowhere, without plot or point. Torturous.