UNVEILED: TAMAR Lineage of Grace, Book 1

Barbara Rosenblat has uphill work bringing conviction and narrative drive to this thin and padded story, not Rivers’s best. In it, the Canaanite Tamar, an ancestor of Jesus, is married much against her will to Israelite Judah’s vicious son, Er, and then is given to Er’s unpleasant brother, Onan. The problem for the narrator is that Tamar’s distant, alien culture is so male dominated that women have effectively the same rights as livestock. How to make Tamar a psychologically sympathetic woman with spirit and will, when in fact she has almost no ability to affect her own fate? Rosenblat advocates for the text by treating every line, however repetitive, as if it were stunning and revelatory, and Tamar’s situation of earthshaking importance to her personally. B.G. 2014 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2013]