Christ the Lord

Anne Rice built her literary reputation through an elaborately constructed Gothic horror mythology of vampires and witches. But now Rice, who has returned to the Catholic faith of her youth, eschews these dark, unholy topics in favor of the sacred, with this first in a series of retellings of the life of Jesus, inspired by the New Testament, scholarly histories, and the Apocrypha. In this first-person account, seven-year-old Jesus studies with the scholar Philo; moves with his family from Alexandria, Egypt, to Nazareth in Roman-ruled Israel; performs miracles; and confronts Satan, all the while aware that he is different from other children, but not entirely sure why.