115 of 138 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not what it's hyped up to be...., September 26, 2006
This review is from: The Expected One: A Novel (Book One of the Magdalene Line) (Hardcover)
I found this book to be somewhat mediocre.. I almost felt as if it was a "Da Vinci Code" wannabe. It was good at some parts, very interesting and does make you wonder, but just wasn't convincing enough. After Da Vinci Code, I found myself actually thinking about things I would read, or looking closely at pictures of the Last Supper and reflecting back on what I read in the book.. This book did not enthrall or bind me in the same way. It's worth the read if you would like to expand your ideas about religion, but if you loved Da Vinci code, you might be disappointed as it is far from being as captivating as that.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Disappointment, November 28, 2007
This review is from: The Expected One: A Novel (Book One of the Magdalene Line) (Hardcover)
This book has a bit of personal history. We were in Michigan, at a Borders, when I overhead a couple of women talking about it. The reason they were buying it? Their church told them not to. That piqued my interest, as well as the "50% off" sticker that was affixed to the cover.
The Expected One, by Kathleen McGowan, begins with a woman writing a passage in "The Gospel of Mary Magdalene" in the year 72 AD. It flashes forward nineteen hundred years to a murder and a woman experiencing visions. It is the woman with the visions, Maureen Paschal, that this novel centers. Maureen is researching a new book on Mary Magdalene, and her travels take her from Jerusalem to the south of France. It is in France that she learns that she could the The Expected One, the one that will locate the lost gospel of Mary. These lost writings will reveal Mary's love affair with Jesus, her role in early Christianity, details on her children (some from her marriage to Jesus), and a first person account of the crucifixion. As you might expect, there are those that do not want the gospel found and want to stop Maureen and her associates.
There is a lot of background in this novel, as McGowan weaves in passages from "The Gospel of Mary Magdalene" and Maureen's visions. The early portions of the book seemed to unfold slowly (thus, it took a few starts and stops to get me back to reading) but the second half of the book really picked up. I thought that there were quite a few loose ends, but I now see that this book is intended to be the first part of a trilogy. Good thing. I didn't understand why McGowan introduced some fanatical elements, only to discard them midway through the book. Perhaps they were there as placeholders for what is to come. Also, some other loose ends were neatly wrapped up at the end, which didn't really make sense after the build-up. Again, I expect that McGowan will expand upon those parts in a later novel.
Take the time to read the Afterword, as it provides the reader with additional information on McGowan's extensive research, and thoughts, that ended in the writing of this book. And it isn't everyday that you read the Acknowledgements and find a "Thank You" to Jackson Browne.
Overall, if it wasn't that it was 50% off and some people were told not to read it, I never would have picked it up. And the fact that it took me so long to get through it, tells me that it is a book that I wouldn't recommend. However, now that I have started her trilogy, I will have to find out how it all ends. So, McGowan has pulled me into her orbit. But the next books will come from the library.
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90 of 114 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An Ego Trip to Rennes-le-Chateau, September 20, 2006
This review is from: The Expected One: A Novel (Book One of the Magdalene Line) (Hardcover)
An early, yet seminal moment in Kathleen McGowan's "The Expected One" is depicted as the protagonist, Maureen Paschal, leads her class of university students, hands raised solemnly, in an oath "to remember at all times that all words committed to paper have been written by human beings. And, as all human beings are ruled by their emotions, opinions, and political and religious affiliations, subsequently all history is comprised of as much opinion as fact and, in many cases, has been entirely fabricated for the furthering of the author's personal ambitions or secret agenda."
To the degree that this may or may not be an entirely accurate or fair assessment of all recorded history, by this statement McGowan ably demonstrates that the same maxim may be applied to the historical novel.
From her literary agency's website, we learn that McGowan's first novel (though not her first published book) "is the result of the author's twenty years of research on four continents and her privileged access to secret societies. Filled with previously unreleased information concerning the lives of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, McGowan's first book of The Magdalene Line Trilogy reveals secrets kept in blood and faith for 2000 years, startling information that has been closely guarded since the time of the Crucifixion."
Yet there does not appear to be a single "historical" detail revealed in this work that had not been published previously in the last two decades by diverse authors such as Laurence Gardner, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince, Margaret Starbird, and most recently, Dan Brown. Only the self-aggrandizing embellishments appear to be unique to this author. From the novel's afterword, McGowan states, "In my need to protect the sacred nature of this information and those who hold it, I had no choice but to write this, and the subsequent books in the series, as fiction. However, many of my protagonist's adventures and virtually all of her supernatural encounters are based on my own life experiences." Experiences, it would appear, that included carefully selective culling of theoretical and hypothetical details from previously published mass market titles, presented for her self-serving purposes as proven fact. The protagonist Maureen Paschal, we are told by McGowan, is the author herself - "The Expected One", the direct bloodline descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, chosen to reveal their hitherto unknown "true" story to the world in fictional form. The problem for McGowan is that the "truth" onto which she clumsily grafts herself has been told countless times by more credible authors who have resisted the temptation to cast themselves as children of the Holy Grail.
A colleague of mine recently summed up the current craze for revisionist history masquerading as fiction (and vice-versa) in a succinct way that, though not addressing this work specifically, I find entirely applicable to McGowan's debut novel: "Where we stand now is there is a popular and highly deceptive genre that caters to the undiscerning. Every speculation can be spun into a series of books. One can call such speculations fiction, and promulgate even more bizarre notions. A large percentage seem to believe the fiction, and there is a lively market of sub genre books and media that debunk the more idiotic ideas, or even worse, try to implant some theological substitute <....> Take speculation, add inspiration, promulgate revelation. The revisionists <....> formulate their mindwarp on an endlessly renewing audience of the naive."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Readers are advised to raise their hands and recite the solemn oath to remember that novels, like historical accounts, can be entirely fabricated to further an author's personal ambitions.
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