Location : Cleveland, OH
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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