A review by poisonenvy
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

adventurous funny medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

While I read this book back in some weeks ago, I withheld my review in support of the HarperCollins Union strike, which lasted for ver two months. In light of their recently ratifying their contract, I'll post my review now:

This was a buddy read with my friend Kori! 

I will start off this review by talking about the problematic aspects of this story:  There were times reading this book where I was somewhat uncomfortable with the depictions of Chinese people, but as the entire story is pretty irreverent in general, I didn't put too much thought into it.  That was right up until chapter 21, where
Biff and Joshua go to India.  While in India, they discover the Untouchables, and a classicists caste system. This isn't the racism. This is just history. There, they discover that the children have been kidnapped to be part of a human child sacrifice, and when they go to crash the ritual, they find cannibalism and necrophilia being very celebrated.  You can argue that this actually happened in history, though every source I could find for this comes from sources that have every reason to villainize the HIndu religion, but most sources I found also said these practices came into effect around 700 AD, which, if you're doing the math, is about 700 years after this story takes place. 

If that isn't bad enough, when they return the children to the Untouchables, who were not part of the ritual, none of them want their children back.  Except for the one guy who's fucking a bull cow (yes, that animal that is sacred to Hindus), who is "the reincarnation of his wife." 


After that unfortunate foray, I had much less patience for the fact that literally every woman in this book is a breathing sex doll who has no other personality or purpose than to suck Biff's dick.
Including an 80 year old woman who just... appears? To tempt Biff into sex? and then is never seen again?
 

If it wasn't for all of that, I would have enjoyed this book quite a lot. It made me laugh more than once, and that ending came in like a gut punch.  The parts that were meant to convey strong emotion did it with a skill surprising in light of the way the rest of the novel is written (or, possibly, it works even better because of the way the rest of the novel is written. The ending came a little too fast, but other than this, this could have been an excellent novel.
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