But unsurprisingly her family has other plans for her, and Ana’s path takes her to a crowded marketplace to meet her betrothed, a man selected by her father for his wealth and connections. Ana’s voice, her written word, become her prayer and her singular focus as a young woman. In foil to Ana’s tradition- and power-loving parents, her Aunt Yaltha, of whom Ana had known nothing prior, appears one day from Egypt and continues to enlarge Ana’s world view. She masterfully reads and writes in multiple languages by her teens (the time at which the novel opens). Ana, however, receives a gift from her otherwise traditional father: the gift of literacy. She comes of age in a world of strict social and class roles, rigid along gender lines, in Sepphoris of Galilee in the early years of Common Era. Ana, from whose first-person perspective the story unfolds, is the daughter of the local regent’s head scribe. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings (2020) presents a beautiful, and at times raw, look at the life of women in first century Israel and Egypt.
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