Last Days in Moav
Israelite twins with healing gifts feature in Sharon Reiss Baker’s suspenseful historical novel Last Days in Moav, about family duty and finding the courage to love.
Decades after his ancestors’ exodus from Egypt, Netanel dies in a desert flood. Thereafter, he watches over his siblings Milcah and Gidon through an otherworldly veil. In a mysterious act involving golden light, he aids the twins when they ask for help to heal a goat. Later, the twins offer healings from “beyond” that invoke God, employing folk herbal remedies. Nobody knows whether their abilities are unholy magic or genuine blessings. Gidon’s knack for predicting catastrophic weather causes further unrest.
The alternating perspectives result in tension. The twins navigate tribal differences; their enthusiastic brother Avidan fills in key details; and Netanel addresses his future audience—people who “send images across oceans, shoot into space, and witness celestial explosions”—with oracular urgency, expressing his yearning interventions in his siblings’ lives. His fabulistic narration is a tantalizing complement to the notion that both the living and the dead have vital stories to tell.
The crisp, straightforward prose covers the death of Moses and the tribe’s anticipated crossing into a promised land alongside the twins’ desires for their own marriages, despite fears that their strange vocations make them unmarriageable. Their community is fleshed out in terms of their shared living spaces and chores, and in terms of how they respond to the twins’ healing work, with their reactions ranging from tacit approval to resentment. When a feud threatens Milcah with an unwanted betrothal, it dials up the book’s weighty considerations of obligation and injustice.
In Last Days in Moav, a spiritual novel set in biblical times, preternatural siblings mature through instances of strife and reconciliation.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
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