The Liars’ Gospel, Naomi Alderman
Alderman is better known today for her novel The Power, which won the Women’s Prize in 2017, but she wrote three novels before that, including this one, The Liars’ Gospel. The Liars’ Gospel tells the story of Jesus from four different perspectives: Mary, Judas, a high priest, and Barabbas. In the present day, we almost never think about Jesus at 10 years old, or 15 years old, nor about the aftermath of his death and what the people of the time thought about it (spoiler, not much at all). Alderman masterfully takes readers through these different viewpoints to present Jesus as he probably was for most people: a normal man (possibly with mental health problems) who became a preacher and then died for his beliefs – not so different from many of the other men and women, preachers or not, who the Roman Empire put to death during their reign. The narrative normalizes a figure who, in my opinion, Western society today has unthinkingly put on a very high yet undeserving pedestal, and reminds us that none of us can know the truth of the past absolutely.
Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia
Of Women and Salt follows four generations of Cuban and Cuban American women as they deal with everything from male violence, revolution, emigration, cultural assimilation, and addiction. The story begins in 1880s Cuba with María Isabel, the only woman worker in a cigar-rolling factory, and continues all the way to present-day Miami, where her descendent Jeanette is struggling with addiction and decides to return to Cuba to meet the grandmother she has never spoken to. Interlaced with these characters is the story of two Salvadorian women who entered into the U.S. escaping violence back home. Garcia include these two groups of women to expose the intricate differences between them, because from the outside all we normally see are the similarities. This book could have easily been 100 pages longer if Garcia had chosen to develop the Cuban characters more, which leads to the obvious question of, why didn’t she? I loved the book as it was but it seemed to just touch upon the surface of what it could have been.