SuitabookAn Unexpected Hero
Rachel Spier Weaver, Anna Haggard
- Reading
- Read it together if you want to discuss how a retelling can interpret a traditional story. Pause around the spies’ danger, the family bargain and the closing religious claims.
- Themes
- Courage and clever action: Rahab hides the spies, devises their escape and demands safety for herself and her family. Her courage and ingenuity are treated as admirable qualities and central to her new beginning.
- Faith and religious interpretation: Rahab hears about belief in one God, seeks guidance from the newly found God, and is linked to Jesus in the retelling. Faith is presented as guiding Rahab and as part of the honour granted to her.
- The treatment of Rahab’s past: Rahab’s adult life as a prostitute is referred to indirectly as making “bad choices”, with the profession hinted at in a readers’ note. The book appears to minimise explicit discussion of this part of her life while retaining it as background to her story.
- Worth knowing
- The story includes danger, threatened discovery, a city’s destruction and a woman’s adult prostitution, though the latter is softened into language about “bad choices” and hinted at in a readers’ note.