Christ the Lord

What the critics are saying about
Anne Rice's
"Christ the Lord
"
"A riveting, reverent imagining of the hidden years of the child Jesus . . . A triumph of tone--her prose lean, vivid--and character . . . "Christ the Lord" is a cross between a historical novel and an update of Tolstoy's "The Gospels in Brief," it presents Jesus as nature mystic, healer, prophet and very much a real young boy . . . Essentially it's a mystery story, of the child grappling to understand his miraculous gifts and numinous birth . . . As he ponders his staggering responsibility, the boy is fully believable--and yet there's something in his supernatural empathy and blazing intelligence that conveys the wondrousness of a boy like no other . . . With this novel, Anne Rice has indeed found a convincing version of him; this is fiction that transcends story and instead qualifies as an act of faith."
--"Kirkus Reviews"
"Rice retains our rapt attention with the use of small, visceral details. We can almost taste the food Jesus would have eaten, experience the sights and sounds, the chaos and bustle of a large clan, with which he would have been familiar."
--Bernadette Murphy, "The Los Angeles Times"
"Rice is as serious as a Commandment, and has muscled up her story of the junior Jesus by obsessively researchig the most minute detail of family, communal and religious life in first-century Palestine. . . . Rice is just as ambitious, much more orthodox and just getting warming up . . . From Lestat the vampire to Jesus the Lord is a supernatural stretch but Rice makes it. Convincingly."
--Bill Bell, "Daily News"
"Well-researched and nicely written and Rice uses restraint in telling her tale. She believably represents Jesus' gradual understanding of his origins and fate. . . . Reverent and often moving."
--Natalie Danford, "People"
"[Rice] writes this book in a simpler, leaner style, giving it the slow but inexorable rhythm of an i