It isn't my fault; the bookstore tempted me!

I stopped by Borders today and my eye was drawn to a faux-leather, black-with-gold-lettering book on the new-releases table: lo! A new edition of Lamb! It's bound to resemble a typical low-end Bible, with the ornamented cover, gilt edges, red-ribbon bookmark and all, and it looks simply wonderful! [About the only thing they didn't do is print Joshua's statements in red, but given how many lines he has, it would have made the book appear to have suffered a severe spaghetti-sauce-spluttering accident, so perhaps it's just as well.] It's also got an updated afterword by the author as a bonus, but I'd have probably bought it anyway!

I first read this book several years ago, thanks to generous BCers (for that copy click here). It wasn't quite what I expected - although I don't know exactly what I *did* expect - but I loved this book. Sweet, funny, crude, touching - wildly slapstick in places and poignant in others, with a more sympathetic view of Jesus than I've seen in many a year (and from many a church)... I enjoyed it so much [including laughing out loud and scaring the cats - I learned early not to read this while drinking anything lest I spew mouthfuls of coffee or beer all over the landscape] that I bought a hardcover copy for my permanent collection, and when the paperback edition came out I acquired a couple specifically for release. It's tempting to quote from nearly every page, but I'll just offer this one sample:

He was a pretty normal kid, for the most part. There was the trick he did
with the lizards, and once we found a dead meadowlark and he brought it back
to life, and there was the time, when we were eight, when he healed his
brother Judah's fractured skull after a game of 'stone the adulteress' got
out of hand. (Judah could never get the hang of being an adulteress. He'd
stand there stiff as Lot's wife. You can't do that. An adulteress has to be
wily and nimble-footed.) The miracles Joshua performed were small and quiet,
as miracles tend to be, once you get used to them.

Now that I have the Gospel-facsimile edition, I'll be able to release my previously-permanent-collection hardcover. But unless I wind up with a duplicate copy of this one, I think I'll be hanging on to it for quite some time!

[The new afterword in this edition was very entertaining and informative. Moore describes the inspiration for Lamb and explains how he selected his sources and did his research, with some typically Moore-ian asides along the way. And there's a TV Tropes page on the book, with some interesting tidbits.]

I left this book in the Little Free Library on this lovely day; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in NH here.]

** Released for the 2023 You're Such an Animal challenge. **