The Way by Kristen Wolf

I think this is the most powerful piece of literature I've ever read. And the most daring. It will not be everyone. The thoughts it evokes will offend many. It is not for the extremely devout. That said, please respect the following thoughts are part of a review and what this book made me think as I read it.

Think on this for a moment: from the moment you are born, you are told this is the way and there is no other way. You never see proof of this. You are simply told over and over again. You are given books written by men that say this is the way. You accept it as you are never allowed to really think for yourself. But what if it wasn't the way?

This book...just wow. Where to start?

Imagine if Jesus had been a woman named Anna. She lives in a society ruled by the Old Testament. Women are inferior and treated as such. They are dirty, imbeciles, told they are products of men and made to wait on men  hand and foot. But the world hadn't always been that way. People forgot, greedy men made them forget through threats, intimidation, and outnumbering, that man came from woman. Does not a woman give birth to all?

It takes finding a special group of "pagan" like women in The Narrows (the desert) for Anna to realize the way is not necessarily the way she was taught. With these women, she becomes someone special. She determines to spread the way around the world. And she has been blessed with male like features... so what better way to reach the wolves than to dress as wolf despite the fact she is a sheep?


After the ruin, desecration of her precious community of healers, this is what she does, but her presence, her following, frightens the priests and the men who wish to maintain their power. Don't teach people that women are equal! Don't say priests are wrong... don't teach people to think for themselves... The priests feel their power and money running out.

Many names were familiar in this story of a woman Jesus and her downfall, but their tales are NOT what you read in the bible. Peter is almost a twin with a strange yearning. Judas...did he really betray Jesus? Mary of Magdalene...what was her relationship to Jesus? Was it really the Jesus everyone loved that died on the cross? A story of epic proportions unfolds from Anna's childhood to Jesus as a shepherd to Anna the Sister, to Jesus the healer, and finally to a woman betrayed.

Beautifully written, shocking in its path, and thought evoking...this book will resonate with me forever. It's a perfect example of how something beautiful can be destroyed and misconstrued, how the numbers of men, greed and hate, can too easily control the world.

I give this five bikes and say, "holy smokes, this author has balls."

I bought this book.

"It never ceased to amaze him how easily ordinary people could be led into treachery. All that was required, it seemed, was teaching them from a young age what to see and think and feel--to believe, for example, that a flower was not a wonder of its own accord, but the act of a singular god."