Discover how Immah has touched the hearts of readers around the world.
What Readers Are Saying
Written by someone whom I happen to know is a very educated, scholarly writer! Highly recommend!
I found this imaginative spin about Mary's early life quite charming!
Amazing to see girlhood from the view of a mother. 10/10 would recommend
What could the Virgin Mary's life like have been like when she was growing up? That is the main question I had when I started reading this book. And my question was answered in profound ways. I feel so much closer to the persona of the virgin Mary now. While reading the Immah, I felt many of the emotions that Mary must have felt, i connected to her in my minute human way.
I wanted to read this book to get an idea of how a human could have possibly lived with such a tragedy as losing a son who also happened to be the Son of Man. How can someone live with that? Read Immah by Fran Hillyer!
Interesting story about the mother of Jesus, as a young child, and the twists and turns of her childhood, giving glimpses of what it will take to be the mother of the Messiah. Beginning and ending with the wedding at Cana, she is shown to be a remarkable, experienced, and knowledgeable woman chosen to be deserving of the weight and responsibility she will carry as the Immah of the savior. The story gave me pause and food for thought... I like this Mother Mary.
WHAT A GREAT STORY! I couldn’t stop reading until I was done. Finished in 3 days! Really brings this time period to life and the character development is really engaging.
A superficial reading of Fran Hillyer's Immah, subtitled "A Young Hebrew Girl is Chosen for a Holy Destiny" might go no further than "well, that was interesting - someone decided to imagine a backstory for Mary, the mother of Jesus, and we don't really know what her life was like as a child and young woman so um, yeah - I liked it." Look a little deeper, though, and what we have in Immah is a thoughtful exploration of the central importance of motherhood and mothers themselves to the human experience. Miriam is Immah to Yeshua. Anna is Immah to Miriam. Savta is Immah to Anna. Interestingly, we see Jesus only briefly, perhaps suggesting that even the son of god is bound to affirm that without mothers, we are nowhere, and that the holy destiny of the title applies not only to Miriam/Mary, but to motherhood itself. Not everyone will be willing, inclined, or able to suspend disbelief at some elements of Miriam's story (which is ironic given the suspension of disbelief required by the gospels themselves, particularly with regard to virgin birth). For those who are, though, Immah is a carefully crafted and compelling story, well worth reading.
My mother (Fran Lockart Hillyer) wrote a novel! I was able to read it in its early edit, so I knew it was good from the beginning. My mother (ahem - PhD, the only Dr. Hillyer in the family) taught and studied literature her whole life. But there is the knowledge that she has done that, and then there is seeing her passion for literature woven into a piece of work that is daring, feminist, and yet accessible because it takes the divine to the human level.
And taking divinity to a human level is risky. My mother chose NOT to write a story about contemporary characters taken from a coffee shop existence to a familiar menu of catharses: mere financial, romantic, or family crises. No, my mother decided to write about Mary the mother of Jesus. The woman in the paintings. The young woman who experienced immaculate conception. The woman who gave birth to the savior (not Brian). The mother who watched her son die in pain and suffering. My mother decided to give her a childhood, an education, an adolescence, and a dilemma of human emotions for a divine presence.
I was so impressed with my mother's choice to write this in the first place. "Wow mom! You're gonna get death threats! That will be good publicity." I think that is what I said before she even finished, and my intention was praise. Because, to the fundamentalist, this novel would challenge the safe 2-dimensional perfection of a painting they have been looking at. Now there is a voice and an internal monologue. Now there is a girl, a woman, a mother.
But the special aspect of my mother's novel is that we can identify with this person, feel empathy, and hope for her. We know how the story ends since it is written in millions of versions all across the planet, but we see it through the eyes of the woman.
Check it out.