love love love this book my favorite book of all time! one of the few books you could read again and still enjoy!

This book is superbly and beautifully written. It brings to life so many biblical stories that I had basically forgotten, and gave new meaning to those passages. Diamant does a great job of showing what could have happened to influence the stories of the Bible. The only drawbacks were the constant barrage of tricky and complicated names, which I kept forgetting.

When you write a novel everybody knows it's a novel. When you write a true story is the same. The problem begins when someone wants to write a novel from a true story and here everybody knows the Jacob's story as is written in the Bible so here are the flaws:You don't have to explain every little detail as it is written in the Bible and then explain the same as you wish it were. You can give a general description and then write something of your own but without changing the main story.You can't change what happened so why trying to do it by writing a different thing?You can write an unbias or funny or sad explanation of a true story depending in your point of view, but to change the core of what really happened?Of course nobody knows for sure what exactly happened 5,000 years ago but no one have found the Bible as untrue.

Diamant actually had me until she started cribbing way too much from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for this re-imagining of the Biblical rape of Dinah in the Book of Genesis. She ravages Jewish history in order to play on the cuddly notion that menstruation (I'm sorry, "our moon time") is a spiritual event that binds all women together - making Diamant a perennial book club favorite among women to whom I do not wish to be bound (shared biological functions notwithstanding). It doesn't help that Diamant keeps forgetting Dinah is telling her story in the first person, which she continues to do even when Dinah is not, technically, in the scene. The fourth wall breaks most painfully when Dinah describes her own death.

This is a book every woman should read. I recommend it to everyone and it is often a gift I give to the woman in my life.

This book quickly became tiresome as one realized that the main action in the book revolved around the bodily functions of the tribal women - bleeding, breeding and birthing. In the first half of the book all of the men, with the exception of one lone husband who didn't last long, were cruel beasts who had no use for their women (other than sex and food) and no interest in their female children. Is one to draw the conclusion from this book that the men of the old testament were self-centered brutes who treated women as chattel? I think so.