Sarah

Listeners will be transfixed by the rich performance of Bernadette Dunne as she transports us to biblical times through the story of Sarah and Abraham. At the novel's outset, we meet Sarah as an elderly woman preparing to die. The story quickly shifts to the earlier time when Sarah reaches womanhood and makes the bold decisions that will alter the course of her life. Dunne embraces the role of Sarah at every moment, revealing her fear and na•veté as a teen, her first feelings of passion toward the young Abraham, and her maturing understanding of the world and her faith in God. As author Marek Halter completes the projected trilogy, this reviewer hopes that Bernadette Dunne will be chosen to resume her role as narrator. K.M.D. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

April 5, 2004
Yet another entry in the burgeoning subgenre of fictional portraits of biblical women (see, for example, Rebecca Kohn's retelling of the story of Queen Esther in The Gilded Chamber
, Forecasts, Mar. 15), Halter's novel (the first in a trilogy) adheres to a by now familiar formula: frank sexual and emotional revelations presented against a backdrop of burnished interiors. Halter's Sarah is born Sarai, the daughter of one of the most powerful lords of Ur. At the age of 12, she is pledged in marriage to a man she has never met, and despite the finery of her bridal chamber ("Everything was new.... Linen rakutus
as smooth as a baby's skin"), she flees in distress. Dragged back to her father's house, she doses herself with an herbal concoction that leaves her barren and is made a priestess of Ishtar, Ur's goddess of war. Six years later, an encounter with her childhood love, the handsome Abram, furnishes her with the chance she's been waiting for: she escapes with him and joins his nomadic tribe. Her contentment is short-lived, because Abram is called by God to leave his tribe and set out for a new land, whereupon the familiar (but freely adapted) Bible story unfolds. The misery Sarah feels at being barren, the indecent love her nephew Lot expresses for her, her encounter with Pharaoh and her quarrel with Hagar, the slave woman who gives Abram a child, shape the novel's second half. Halter isn't afraid to present headstrong Sarah as bitter in her old age, and his complex portrait of the biblical matriarch gives this solid if predictable novel a dash of freshness.