Drawing in the Dust is the story of Page Brookstone, a brilliant Biblical archaeologist who seems to have hit a wall in both her career and her personal life when an Arab couple shows up to her dig at Har Meggido, claiming he souls of two lovers are trapped beneath their home; they beg Page as they begged countless other archaeologists before her to come investigate, and at first Page brushes it off. But her curiosity gets the better of her, and she ends up on the Barakats' porch, and what she finds beneath their home--namely two skeletons buried in an anachronistic embrace--will not only change her personal life but the world she is working in as well.
What Page and her team find in her cistern can be interpreted many different ways, depending on which angle one reads the book from. Is it confidence? Happiness? Love? Acceptance? I was drawn to Page because her self-sabotage seems all to familiar to me, especially at this age of transition in my life. It was interesting to me, however, to see that same self-sabotage in someone who had already ostensibly found and followed her dreams. I was also really drawn to the idea of Anatiya, of a woman who rose up and told her story in a world where she was both physically and metaphorically mute. Strong female characters usually cement me into a book's hold, and this one had not one but two--although technically one spoke through the other. The parallel stories of Page and Anatiya make this book work in a way that is hard to pinpoint. It points to the transcultural/historical/time confederacy of women, one fighting to let the other be heard. Page and her team didn't find the scrolls until nearly 200 pages in. To me, this is important. It allows the reader to focus on Page as the locus of the story instead of the scrolls and Anatiya. By letting Page go that far telling the story before making her discovery, Klein allows Anatiya and her voice to be an echo of Page herself.
One of the first things I notice about a book is its writing. I notice the language, the efficacy of a character's communication, the way the author brings her world off the page and into the space around me. This was the first book in a good while where, while I was reading, I totally let the world around me fall away and became engrossed. Although at times it seemed a little overdone, a little too florid, as the novel progressed Zoë Klein's style became more and more fitting to her story. In order to tell a story about a woman who lives digging up the Biblical past and waxing poetic about what it might've been, the author has to create a language that allows for that sort of talk, and Klein delivered. In fact, Klein used her magic to create an entire scripture off of which this book is based: The Scroll of Anatiya by Zoe Klein is available for the public eye as a sort of companion to this text, as well as to Jeremiah's. The excerpts from her scroll at the beginning of each chapter tell of the love story between Jeremiah and Anatiya, and they seem to echo the present-day (love?) story between Mortichai and Page.
I chose this book for the Romantic Suspense category of the book challenge, and it paid off. The story of two forbidden loves, one modern and one ancient, and the connections between the two push the story along, keeping the pages turning. The idea of these two parallel loves subverts traditional gender roles by allowing Anatiya to exist in her own respect and challenges traditional relationship paradigms by painting Page and Mortichai opposite each other, so different in almost every respect but the love they share for the past. Rabbi Klein's novel has created a whole new kind of Da Vinci Code, one that digs not only into the past but also into the hearts of its very readers.
