Red-Robed Priestess

September 26, 2011
With Red-Robed Priestess, Cunningham, a storyteller as crafty as J.K. Rowling, ends the Maeve Chronicles befittingly and beautifully, with a fourth novel as fully fruited as the first. Maeve, the Celtic daughter of eight warrior mothers in the first century, is also a prescient storyteller who speaks 21st-century colloquial (“now here is where it gets a little dicey”). Throughout the books, she is a Druid, a prostitute in Rome, a healer “with the fire of the stars in her hands,” a weather witch at sea, a priestess, and, as Mary Magdalen, the wife of Jesus and mother of their daughter, Sarah. On a quest near the end of her saucy, savvy life, her red hair gray, Maeve finds her first daughter, taken from her at birth by the Druids, in Boudica, Britain’s legendary rebel queen. The battle of the Iceni against the Romans, famed in song and story, contrasts with the peace Maeve finds at last. Cunningham, always excellent when detailing bloody battles and earthy sex, exercises well her skills with description, history, and myth in and out of the Bible, character, song, and poetry, especially in the fine and final poem.