Summary and Reviews of Christ The Lord Out of Egypt by Anne Rice

Media Reviews

The New York Times - Janet Maslin Christ the Lord shares predilections with her other books. Even in biblical times and in the Holy Land, Ms. Rice retains her obsessions with ritual and purification, with lavish detail and gaudy decor. But she writes this book in a simpler, leaner style, giving it the slow but inexorable rhythm of an incantation. The restraint and prayerful beauty of Christ the Lord is apt to surprise her usual readers and attract new ones.

Washington Post - Melvin Jules Bukiet Whether Jesus was the soul of mercy or, as some historians have claimed, a political rabble-rouser, the one quality he must have had in order to live through the millennia was spirit. It's the one great quality the Bible has in abundance, as revealed by either the chiseled spareness of Everett Fox's translation of Genesis or the luscious oratory of King James. Rice has sucked the life out of the greatest story ever told.

School Library Journal - Matthew Moffet This new direction for Rice is both bold and reverent, and is bound to please fans and newcomers alike.

Kirkus Reviews With this novel, she has indeed found a convincing version of him; this is fiction that transcends story and instead qualifies as an act of faith. Joins Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ and Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus as one of the bolder re-tellings.

Library Journal - Tamara Butler Rice's superb storytelling skills enable her to succeed where many other writers have failed.

Booklist - Kristine Huntley By no means presenting a radical version of Jesus, Rice does an admirable job of rendering Jesus' compassion, his curiosity about the world and other people, and his youthful feelings.

Publishers Weekly As fiction, though, the book's first half is slow going. Since it is told from Jesus' perspective, the childlike language can be simplistic, though as readers persevere they will discover the riches of the sparse prose Rice adopts.