Bright Dark Madonna

March 15, 2009
Third in Cunningham's irreverent chronicle of Mary Magdalen (Magdalen Rising, 2007, etc.).

Maeve (aka the Healer Woman, aka Mary of Magdala) is back, as unapologetically lusty and smart-mouthed as ever. This installment considers the aftermath of Mary's marriage to Jesus. Christ is always with her, but in less corporeal form. Newly resurrected, he's left a motley crew behind to cobble together Christianity: pregnant Maeve, fractious Apostles, mother-in-law Miriam and friends Martha, Mary of Bethany and Lazarus. Knowing that Peter and James are scheming to appropriate Jesus' offspring, Maeve flees Jerusalem for her sacred bordello/Temple of Isis in Magdala, Galilee. After giving birth to a girl, Sarah, with golden eyes identical to her father's, Maeve heads for Celtic territory, Galatia, where she hides out in a mountain shack with baby Sarah and the endearingly loopy Miriam, who hears angel voices and croons litanies to herself. Androgynous Sarah does not welcome puberty. Itinerant, self-appointed Apostle Paul, battered by stoning, is deposited on Maeve's doorstep, and she administers her healing touch, which includes a brief hook-up with the puritanical future saint. When he orders the Galatian women to be silent and quashes a snake-worshiping fest honoring fertility goddess Brigit, Paul triggers a major brouhaha. Sarah embarks on the trail of her absent-though-omnipresent father, and Maeve follows, too late: The Apostles, fooled by Sarah's male attire, tried to circumcise her, and now she's gone to sea. Maeve, sought after by sailors for her ability to manipulate the wind, traverses the Mediterranean in fruitless pursuit. Then, with Miriam, Maeve journeys to Ephesus, shrine of huntress-deity Artemis, the logical place for a band of neo-Amazon pirates led by Sarah to wash up. In Ephesus, Miriam prepares for her Assumption; Paul once again sets precedents for Church-sanctioned sexism; and 50-something Maeve takes a lover—John the Evangelist.

Gleefully iconoclastic. For that dwindling demographic with a sense of humor about religion, Maeve's profane skewering of the all-too-human foibles of the Church fathers is a hoot.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2009
Having brought Jesus back to life la Isis reviving Osiris, Maeve, the Celtic Magdalen, suffers early-pregnancy nausea as this volume of Cunninghams four-part series opens. Thus inconvenienced, she misses Pentecostpar for the course for Maeve, who not only turns up in the wrong place at the wrong time but also is a no-show at the centers of power when the Christian story is articulated for the ages. Which is why we dont know about her and Jesus daughter, the Amazonian pirate Sarah. Or about how she lived among the Galatians with Jesus mother, Mary, whom she later escorted to Ephesus to learn how to become a mother-goddess from the great Artemis. Or how she saved Paul of Tarsus from death, only to have her daughter stolen by him. As usual, Cunningham provides plenty of juicy controversy embodied by vivid characters and expressed in vigorous action, all in crisply drawn biblical settings. As the book ends, Maeve turns her eyes back to the Celtic world that birthed her.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)