Mario Entero Entero itibaren Yarivka, Chernivets'ka oblast, Ukrayna
This book is about how, after JC's death, there was a struggle between heretic believers- those who believed in personal enlightenment and shunned a church hierarchy- and the disciple of John's beievers- patriarchal, hierarchal, congregational- and why John's side won. GG is based on the gnostic gospels which were discovered in urns buried in a cave in Egypt 1950. They had likely been suppressed by the dominant faction. It does a good job describing how present-day Christianity evolved and, in a sense, how many other religions evolve, for good or for ill. The pattern is as such: leader dies; followers dispute what his teachings meant and diverge into different paths; one branch gains dominance and spends a lot of it's time exterminating the others. This is the same in Islam, probably also in Judaeism, etc. cg
I recently wrote in another review about how that book was adult fantasy fiction in that it eschewed a lot of the fantasy genre staples and rigidly employed a "show don't tell" aesthetic. This book does that even more so, often having more in common with historic fiction than fantasy. The book follows one aristocratic family caught up in the events surrounding the fall of a king and sets the scene for the tumult that will follow. It gets four stars rather than five for being published in Britain, but confusingly keeping American terms. Perhaps this annoyed me more than it should have done. Probably it did. But it somewhat takes you out of the book when you have to (for example) mentally translate "elk" to "red deer" and "moose" to "elk" so many times.