So I had never read anything by Alice Hoffman when I decided to pick this up off the shelf in our break room. What intrigued me about it (and is still my favorite thing about the book) is that the time period is not one I've often encountered. The book covers 70CE-74CE (I think) when a few hundred Jews sought refuge from Roman persecution, holing out in the desert. Apparently two women and five children survived and Hoffman imagined their lives before and during their time there.
It took a while for me to get "into" the book. The story is told from the perspectives of several of the characters -- telling each of their stories, one at a time, the next character continuing the larger story from their point of view and so on -- and the first character's story didn't grab me as much as those that followed. Yael's ordeal was tragic, yes, and she had a hard life, certainly, but the description of her emotions was a little over the top and I couldn't help but view her as an obsessive teenager while she was telling her side of things. I stuck with it though because the words were assembled prettily (if not melodramatically) and I don't like putting books down.
It got better as it went on (as did Yael, with age and through other people's eyes) with the exception of a weird part in the middle where I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to believe that one of the characters can really do magic and if they then later actually performed an "exorcism" or not.
The novel proved to be more literary than average chick lit of the historical persuasion, which made it a good bus book.
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