Awhile ago I denounced Anne Rice's Christ the Lord for being arch, hard-to-read and silly. Then I read a review of it in National Catholic Register that praised it so highly I figured I'd better give it a second look.
Finished it last night, and while I stand by my sense of Rice's efforts to sound 7 years old as "arch," and still think the prose is choppy-sounding (and seriously doubt the child Jesus ever killed any playmates), it definitely becomes more compelling after chapter 5 --which is right where she lost me the first time. At first Jesus is just too much of a cry-baby. But as the story develops, that drops out, and you see that she's really done a marvelous job painting a picture of what the "hidden" life in Nazareth would have been like, and how a "baby" Jesus might have come to understand who he was (which happens here at age 7 --when he hits the "age of reason") through copious research on the politics and conditions of the time. It's really difficult to explain what an achievement I now think the book is. You should read it --and just bear with it for the first few chapters.
What's also great is her author's note at the end, where she describes her reversion to the Church and all the research she did. She really lets the "Search for the historical Jesus" types have it!
