Visitations from God are a mixed blessing for Noah and his family in Maine's spirited, imaginative debut. Noah (aka "Noe") may have pissed himself upon hearing God's instructions to build an arc, but he sets to the task without delay. He crosses the desert to buy lumber from giants; his eldest, Sem, fetches Cham, the son with shipbuilding skills; Sem's wife, Bera, and Cham's wife, Ilya, gather the animals; and Japheth, Noe's youngest, helps, too, in between goofing off and "rutting" with wife Mirn. And, of course, there's "the wife," 600-year-old Noe's once-teenage bride, who takes everything "Himself" (that's Noe, not God) dishes out with time-tested practicality. Wildly different in temperament, age and provenance, these characters, each telling part of the story, help create a brilliant kaleidoscopic analysis of the situation: the neighbors who ridicule Noe and clan; the inner doubts and shifting alliances; the varying feelings toward God, whose presence is always felt and sometimes resented. The flood comes as a relief from the wondering ("who is crazier: the crazy man or the people who put their faith in him?"), but hardship soon follows. Though the ending is already written, Maine enlivens every step toward it with small surprises. A story of faith and survival (think Life of Pi thousands of years earlier with a much larger cast of characters), this debut is a winner. Booklist Using just a few chapters form Genesis as his base, Maine fleshes out the story of Noah and his ark, making it both realistic—with touches of wry humor—and wondrous. Maine’s Noe is an old man, implacable in believing in Yahweh’s righteousness even when he is plagued by dreadful dreams. His story is told in the third person, in chapters alternating with first-person accounts by his family members—the unnamed wife and three sons and daughters-in-law: obedient Sem and wife Bera, irreverent Cham and wife Ilya, and exuberant Japheth and wife Mirn—resulting in multiple views that add richness to the tale. These are full-dimensional characters, the men diligent and the women resourceful; particularly Ilya, but also Bera, show flashes of feminism in gathering animals (dangerous duty) and questioning what Yahweh has wrought. And there’s no stinting the reality of almost 18 months on the ark: mucking out dung, confronting ferocious beasts, contending with numbing boredom and understandable spats, and enough rutting (in Maine’s words) to make all three young women pregnant. A literary debut that makes a familiar story enthralling. – Michele Leber Kirkus Newcomer Maine cleverly retells the story of Noah and the Flood from the perspective of the great man’s wife and children. According to the old saw, a martyr is someone who lives with a saint, and in the case of Noe, as he is styled in these pages, the truism holds up. The great patriarch may have single-handedly saved the human race, but the simple truth is that he was a royal pain in the neck. Noe’s wife tells it best. She was just 13 when she married the old coot, who was then on the far side of 500, and she learned the hard way what it takes to satisfy a sexacentarian in bed. Withdrawn and largely silent, Noe seems to have more converse with God than he does with his family, and they are long since used to receiving outlandish pronouncements from him out of the blue. But even Noe’s wife has to bite her tongue when he tells her that he has been commanded to build an ark and prepare for a deluge that will destroy the world. The boys are somewhat less nonplussed: Cham has been trained as a shipbuilder and takes the order in stride; Sem and Japheth dutifully put their shoulders to the wheel and start building once the wood miraculously arrives. The daughters-in-law, sent off to gather in all the different species so as to march them two by two up the gangplank, are rather more put out, but that is the way of in-laws. Eventually Noe’s folly is completed, and damned if the old boy wasn’t right. It starts to pour cats and dogs until the thing floats right away, and the rains don’t stop for 150 days. His family members owe their lives to the old man’s uprightness—but that doesn’t make him any easier to put up with, especially aboard ship. Neither satire nor hagiography, but an idiomatic rendering of the biblical tale in accord both with contemporary sensibilities and historical accounts.