Hello everyone and welcome to the Girls Camp podcast Patreon, Girls Camp Unplugged, book club edition.

It is our inaugural book club episode and I can't tell you how excited I am for this. This is

my shit. Being able to read this book and then reading your thoughts and opinions on it is just

so much better than reading a book alone, especially a book like this. We read The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kid, which in a nutshell is the story of Jesus's fictional wife named Anna.

In case you missed it or in case you're new here,

the way that we're doing this book club is every six weeks,

we have a new book cycle.

We all read it in our own time within the six weeks.

And then I have a Google Doc where you can submit your thoughts, feelings, quotes you like,

whatever, so that at the end of the six week period, we have an episode where I get to share

my thoughts and feelings and your thoughts and feelings as well. And someone wrote in and said,

Haley, cry face. I am almost halfway. I had a hard time starting this book and I didn't know how to feel about a low-key

Bible fan fiction, but I am enjoying this so much, so much female rage and sadness. This really is a

low-key Bible fan fiction. That's like the absolute perfect way of saying it. And probably

what I will title this episode, I understand the hesitation as many of us ex-Morman or ex-religious

people have some hang-ups around the Jesus thing. But that is part of what really intrigued me about the premise of this book

is learning about Jesus, but from a completely different lens than I ever had before,

from his fictional wife through a female perspective. And I really think the book delivered

on my expectations. I'll share some of my thoughts on, yeah,

some of the critiques I had of the book, but I would say overall I really enjoyed reading it.

It was different than I thought in the sense that, yes, there was a lot of philosophizing,

...