Usually you couldn't pay me to read a religous based book but Anne Rice is not everyone's common author. She does her research, and sets the tone of the time in which her characters lived. It is more of a human perspective than a religous one. Jesus is a child and he knows he is different but not the backstory. His family is protective and we follow him as Herod the king who has sought him since birth for assignation has died and the fight for the succession to the throne of David. It is a multi level plot line; the life of jesus and his family members, the plaques, the warring of the Romans and the Jewish fight back in Alexandria. The fear of being Jesus and the miracles and the unexpected reaction by the community when Jesus raises a member of the clan who has died. His fears at the direction of his power and the temptation by the devil to use it for otherwize appropriate needs. Not a sucky book and everyone should know that Anne Rice takes her writing very seriously no matter the subject. it will not be what you expected at all!

It doesn't really matter about accuracy - a novelist should be free to play with the facts to get nearer to the truth. What's wrong is the lack of skill in imagining and then depicting a time, a place and a person. In Christ the Lord, Anne Rice has conscientiously taken all the drama, elegance and urgency of the Gospels and the Apocrypha, and flattened them into a tedious and mediocre potboiler. Which is a pity, because it's still a hell of a good idea for a novel.

As for the plot, it's a year in the life of a rather plodding 7-year-old boy. As for suspense, he discovers that several mysterious events attended his birth, but we already know that, and so do all the other characters, who are made entirely of cardboard. Mary is innocent; Joseph steadfast; Mary's brother Cleopas laughs so continuously that he might as well be at a vaudeville show; and James, the savior's older brother, glowers throughout the book with big-time sibling rivalry.

Rice's Christ reads like a bland young-adult novel, written in language that's supposed to be unadorned and poignantly simple but is instead as flat and leeched of poetry as the Good News Bible.

The book's steady attention to such details slows its progress. It stops frequently for scenery, not all of it the kind that a young boy might notice. "It seemed that the women of this place used a loom with one pole to it," he says of Sepphoris, a town near Nazareth, "and one crosspiece at which they had to stand. But we had brought back from Alexandria bigger looms, with two sliding crosspieces, at which the woman could sit, and the women of the village all came to see this." This gives the book a hint of museum diorama.