Zoe Klein

I so did not like this book. The story was silly and the characters unbelievable. But the most insufferable was the writing: repetitive and filled with cliches. I really did not like the author's constant admiration for her own work, the "Scroll of Anatiya," which her characters praise throughout the text. The melodrama! (So many characters are "weeping.") The errors (I sincerely doubt a group of Orthodox Jews would attend the wedding of a Jewish girl and an Arab.) The bizarre ending. Really dreadful.… (mehr)

Paige Brookstone, on a sabbatical from a separate dig with her mentor, unearths the prophet Jeremiah’s bones under an Arab couple’s home. But there are another set of remains intertwined with Jeremiah’s, and the discovery unlocks the humanity that is otherwise overlooked in a Biblical prophet. The find, while fueling a religious and racial battle in an unstable Middle East, also sparks Paige’s near lost passion for archeology and love for life.

Zoe Klein’s [Drawing in the Dust] could be overlooked as just another faith-based story in a growing market. But Klein examines how faith is often deeply submerged in the psyche, uncovered only as the physical world’s debris is brushed away. Jeremiah, the quarry in Paige’s search, comes alive as a flesh-and-blood human as she discovers his long buried love love for a servant girl. His prophecy takes on new meaning as their story is sifted through the sands of time.

Klein’s other accomplishment, beyond giving life to Jeremiah beyond the Bible’s pages, is her construction of another narrative, written by Anatiya, the servant girl who loved Jeremiah. Anatiya’s poetic verse, as written by Klein, sings with a rare beauty, and is so consistent with its Biblical counterpart from Jeremiah that it seems to be completely real. The result is that the Biblical and fictional characters come alive with Paige’s own faith. It’s not a stereotypical and fundamental faith, but one that is born from life.

Bottom Line: Faith and religion as viewed from an ordinary perspective, in anything but an ordinary place and amid anything but ordinary circumstances.

4 bones!!!!!… (mehr)