After reading the Da Vinci Code, I was a little diappointed that the story "ended early." I saw this book as a continuation of the Jesus/Mary story, but it really ruined the moment for me. I wish I hadn't read it. How an actual publishing house picked this up, I'll never know.

The book's mean spirited treatment of Biblical characters I found appalling. John the Baptist and Mary as a couple,could be plausible, but the author then adds scenes of John smacking Mary around in some battered wife syndrome, even carrying his head around while moaning. It was painful to read such outlandish assumptions.

On the whole I found this book trivial and lacking any of the spiritual wonder of the DVC. This reads like a harlequin romance novel with an agenda, and one written by a highschooler at that. There's little mystery in this story, just dialogue between characters and the reading of a Mary Magdalene Gospel which is written by the Magdalene in third person unlimited, an inconsistency that rankles the reader.

This book is not about Mary or Jesus, it's about the writer and what appears to be "channeled," newagey fantasies and bad poems that are supposedly ancient scriptures.

I didn't read the bits until after where she claims this her own, real life experience, and that she wrote it as fiction because it's so dangerous for her to tell it as real life, yet there she goes telling everyone who will listen apparently that it's all really true. The whole business is preposterous and it really seems like she read Holy Blood and recast herself as Pierre Plantard in some attempt to make herself special. Her personal ego and paranoias become evident on every page.

 

What's worse is that she demeans Jesus and Mary and a host of Biblical characters by using them as foils for her alter ego "Maureen." Not so much blasphemous as insulting to my intelligence.

 

 I should have passed on reading this one. One of the few books in my life that actually left me depressed for having wasted my time and my mind on it.

It is that bad.