Mary Called Magdalene : A Novel [Import] [Paperback]

Margaret George (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 896 pages
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan; New Ed edition (2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330411950
• ISBN-13: 978-0330411950
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (109 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Margaret George specializes in epic fictional biographies of historical figures, taking pains to make them as factually accurate as possible without compromising the drama. Her THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HENRY VIII will have its 25th anniversary this September, and continues to be popular. ABC-TV based its 1999 Emmy-nominated "Cleopatra" miniseries on her THE MEMOIRS OF CLEOPATRA. All of her books have been bestsellers, with twenty-one foreign translations.

Margaret's father was in the Foreign Service and so she lived overseas for her early life, in such different places as tropical Taiwan, desert Israel, and cold war Berlin, all of which were great training for a novelist to be. She started writing 'books' about the same time as she could write at all, mainly for her own entertainment. It was a diversion she never outgrew. Her published works are: THE AUTOBIOGAPHY OF HENRY VIII, MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND AND THE ISLES, THE MEMOIRS OF CLEOPATRA, MARY CALLED MAGDALENE, HELEN OF TROY, ELIZABETH I, and an illustrated children's book, LUCILLE LOST.

Margaret lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and Washington DC, and has a sextagenarian tortoise as a pet.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An imaginative telling of Mary Magdalene's life, October 29, 2003

By 

Julie Lovisa (Indiana USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mary, Called Magdalene (Paperback)

After reading The DaVinci Code, I became very interested in Mary Magdalene and her place in history. While she is not cast in the same role as in TDC (which I won't divulge here for those who haven't read the book), I almost like her place in this telling better. She is written as a strong woman who after many years of struggling between possession by pagan gods and her faith in God, is healed by Jesus and becomes one of his disciples.

Since no one knows the true story of MM, Margaret George had to create an entire life for her, giving her the roles of daughter in a pious Jewish family, wife of a man she questions her love for, mother to a daughter whom she conceived after making a deal with one of her pagan possessors, and loyal friend to a girl who follows a different branch of Judaism of which her family doesn't approve.

The book starts out slowly laying a foundation for Mary's life, but read on. After she initially meets Jesus when she is a young girl and finds the idol that becomes the source of her possession problems, things begin to pick up speed. The second half of the book is about her life as a disciple of Jesus and the Passion from her viewpoint. It's also about her undying love for her daughter who was taken from her at the age of two after she began following Jesus and her family disowned her.

As usual, George has done an incredible amount of research into her subject and has written yet another fictional biography that will take you to another world.

44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars sadly disappointed, July 15, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Mary, Called Magdalene (Hardcover)

I absolutely loved the other Margaret George novels; this however is sadly disappointing. I agree with the reviewer who said is is uninspired. It reads like a young adult Sunday School lesson. Mary's dialogue is so unbelievable; the setting is so "clean" and brings to mind 1950's Hollywood Bible stories. I forced myself to read over half way through thinking it would get better, but it doesn't. Margaret - you can do much better!

60 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dull, Plodding and Disappointing, August 9, 2004

By 

wysewomon "wysewomon" (Paonia, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mary, Called Magdalene (Paperback)

I love historical novels. I've read everything else Margaret George has written and loved every page, so when I saw _Mary, Called Magdalene_ on the shelf of the local bookstore I bought it without even opening the cover. Boy was that a mistake! This book is so awful, it's hard to believe it was written by the same author. The characters are flat and lifeless, the research is second-rate and the plot is un-moving--and as the book deals with one of the core stories of Western thought (the ministry and passion of Jesus), that's saying a lot. It's as if because the book deals with the topic of faith and religion, the writer's capacity for critical thought went on vacation. There is no real challenge to the story of the gospels as we know it, no new interpretation and no life. Almost every situation Mary meets from the time she becomes a disciple on comes directly--sometimes verbatim--from the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The ones that don't are so boring that it's hard to care about them.

Other things bothered me about this book: the lack of cultural or historical context for the story, the huge emphasis on literal demon possession, which required way more suspension of disbelief than I was able to sustain and the superficial and inaccurate depiction of ancient Judaic religious thought, to name a few. Knowing what I know about these things, George's Jesus affected me not as an enlightened Master, but as a man driven off the deep end by an internal revelation he is unable to communicate, and his followers seemed mindless subscribers to a cult that promises them release from personal pain, much as modern cults do. This is an interesting interpretation, but I don't think it's the one George intended; therefore, I have to say her book didn't work.

Growing up in the home of a minister and Bible scholar, I spent my entire youth surrounded by books, both fiction and non-fiction, that treated Early Christianity and other Biblical subjects with passion and intellect, setting them in an historical context and making them important and real in human terms. _Mary, Called Magdalene_ is not one of them. From the reviews here it seems that a lot of people liked it, but I can't imagine why.