The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
I finished this book a few days ago. It would fall into the historical fiction category. It's the story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah as mentioned in the bible book of Genesis. It's the story of how she grew up in a male dominant household, the families move away from Laban to Succoth and then subsequently Dinah's encounter with Shechem, son of Hamor, and the Shechems death at the hands of Dinahs brothers. But the writer of this book has used her artistic license at attempted to fill in the gaps that the bible doesn't give us, but she's far off the mark in my opinion. In The Red Tent we read of an unspoken jealousy between Leah and Rachel, Rachel jealous of Leah because of her being the first wife, and Leah jealous of Rachel because she was always the prettiest and Jacobs favorite. Dinah as a young woman falls in love with Shechem and reluctantly Jacob allows them to marry, but then the sons of Jacob proceed to murder all the men in the city. It's at this point in the book where a pregnant Dinah curses all her brothers and father and leaves them and travels down to Egypt with her mother in law where she spends the rest of her days, her son grows up and eventually Dinah finds love again. Whilst in Egypt Dinah in her capacity has a midwife is called to the royal household one night to help deliver a child, it turns out that the father is none other than Dinahs brother Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers, but the Joseph in this book is arrogant and cares little for his family, and even the death of Jacob cannot bring the family back together, and again Joseph and Dinah go the separate ways.
So all in all it's hard to say whether this is a good book or not, because we know the account in the bible, there are points in this book where you just think 'it wouldn't have been like that' for instance in this book Jacob changed his name to Israel because of the shame he suffered when his sons killed the men of Shechem, he changed his name to distance himself from the blood guilt. So if you can seperate this book from the bible accounts then you will most probably enjoy reading this, everyone likes a good love story. Dinah falls in love, she loses her love, and she finds love again. It's worth a few hours of your reading time