Michaela Kolowski

how much of Jesus is about a man, how fully human is Jesus and how much is it about him being a godlike figure, you know, somebody who is godly.

And I think that Sue Monkett is trying to get to that, but maybe she just doesn't quite get there in this book.

But I think maybe for people who are, for whom this is their faith and for whom their primary story is of Jesus without a wife, I think it probably does swing the pendulum quite a long way past where some people are comfortable.

And maybe Sue Monk is doing that as a way of sort of opening people's minds to how females experience religion.

And that's a lovely part of the book.

It doesn't make it necessarily the best work of fiction.

I mean, I think it's technically historical fiction because it's set in the historical past, but I read it as fiction.

I mean, I know that I don't want to necessarily go quite and quite easy on it because Kate's going harder, but I think she wasn't necessarily trying to push a historical retelling or even to push dogma.

I think she was interested in this idea of a love story and reimagining a character and giving that time a different voice and

and talking about the importance of having a voice.

I think, if anything, coming off the back of what Billy just described so beautifully about what really great writing does and that beautiful idea of leaving space for the things that we don't know is that perhaps Sue Monk Kidd as a fiction writer

wasn't quite there yet with this book.

She hasn't quite evolved to the point of being able to do that in a way where she's completely in charge of how she creates that world, of just leaving us a beautiful love story.

And as I said, part of that is also a structural thing, which is the love story is between Anna and Jesus and what they show about each other, what they reflect of each other.

And then in the last third of the book, really, Jesus is just off stage.

So it's not quite enough to sustain the actual fiction part of it itself

I think if anything, it's the fiction part of this that lets it down.

It's the ability, maybe as Billy described, to create a story in a way that is both imaginative and fresh, but also leaves space for us to read things into things and to know that we can't know the answer to everything.

I think the one thing I would say that I love, and it seems to be a bit of a theme that Billy's spoken about that you and Kate have both spoken about as well, Cassie, is that we're going through this wonderful, fantastic wave of telling stories from new perspectives.

and of bringing people into stories and imagining stories from their perspective who were either omitted or who were totally marginalised.