I have been attempting to broaden my fiction collection.  The description of the book Risen intrigued me as it was not the cliched plot of typical Christian fiction.

Upon receiving the book, I realized that it is the novelization of a movie by the same title…Risen.  The novelization is by Angela Hunt.

I must say that I enjoyed the book.  Clavius, a Roman centurion, is tasked to look into the mysterious disappearance of the body of a Jewish man who had been crucified.  Of course, the body cannot be found, and Clavius must come to grips with the reality that Yeshua has indeed risen from the dead as His followers claimed.

Of course, we do not know that these events took place.  Thus the fiction part of this historical fiction book.  But it seems a fair guess that some of this did indeed go down as Rome was forced to deal with the impossible.

One aspect seemed to take the fiction part a bit far, in my opinion.  In the book, Clavius becomes romantically involved with a young Jewish widow.  They begin sleeping together.  It is not graphic in the book, however it seems somewhat far-fetched and mostly irrelevant to the story.

I have read the account of the resurrection many times in the Bible.  Reading it in this context, however, caused me to think about aspects of the story I had not thought of before.  It put me more in the story in a way I have not done in a long while.  Some of Jesus’ words struck right to my core.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed this novelization, and I was pleased to also see the film in the theater this past week.

Note: I received this book for free from Bethany House Publishers in exchange for this review.

-Bonnie