{"id":295,"date":"2008-12-30T23:19:38","date_gmt":"2008-12-31T03:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/30\/review-of-the-handmaid-and-the-carpenter-by-elizabeth-berg\/"},"modified":"2009-01-29T00:10:04","modified_gmt":"2009-01-29T04:10:04","slug":"review-of-the-handmaid-and-the-carpenter-by-elizabeth-berg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=295","title":{"rendered":"Review of The Handmaid and the Carpenter, by Elizabeth Berg"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image339\" height=\"207\" alt=\"handmaid_and_the_carpenter.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/handmaid_and_the_carpenter.jpg\" \/><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The Handmaid and the Carpenter<\/em><\/p>\n<p>by Elizabeth Berg<\/p>\n<p>Random House, New York, 2006.\u00a0 153 pages.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been reading Christmas novels, so here&#8217;s a novel about the original Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>There was a time when I couldn&#8217;t really enjoy novelizations of Bible stories &#8212; I would get upset over quibbles where they didn&#8217;t quite line it up with the Bible text, or the characters would not act as I had imagined them to act.\u00a0 But perhaps I&#8217;ve outgrown that.\u00a0 I&#8217;m quite sure this is not how I would imagine Mary and Joseph, but I did enjoy these characters.<\/p>\n<p>What would it have been like to give birth to the Son of God?\u00a0 And how would your betrothed react?\u00a0 Elizabeth Berg does pull us into the story, in all its wonder, yet with a nod to the reality of dirty straw and a long journey and a village reacting to the story of an angel announcement.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t a dramatically in-depth novelization, but it gives you a taste of what that first Christmas might have been like.\u00a0 Definitely good holiday reading.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0345505913\/sonderbooksco-20\" target=\"outside\">Buy from Amazon.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Find this review on the main site at: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sonderbooks.com\/Fiction\/handmaid_and_the_carpenter.html\">www.sonderbooks.com\/Fiction\/handmaid_and_the_carpenter.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Handmaid and the Carpenter by Elizabeth Berg Random House, New York, 2006.\u00a0 153 pages. I&#8217;ve been reading Christmas novels, so here&#8217;s a novel about the original Christmas. There was a time when I couldn&#8217;t really enjoy novelizations of Bible stories &#8212; I would get upset over quibbles where they didn&#8217;t quite line it up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,48,5,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian","category-christmas","category-fiction-review","category-historical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}