I have given my opinion of Orson Scott Card before. And I’ve come to the following conculsions: 1) he just can’t let things end. Rachel and Leah is the third in a series, and there’s going to be a fourth (for the good reason that the story was just too much for one book). Still. He does tend to draw things out. 2) I really like the first book I read in one of his series (Rebekah this time; I read them out of order), but the more I read, the less I like them. Maybe because they’re often the same story retold? 3) Card can’t write ancient women. Just can’t. I don’t know what they’re supposed to “really” be like, but I really doubt they had conversations with their betrothed about bearing children (and how it’s akin to the preisthood). He takes modern women and dresses them up in sandals and calls is Biblical. I felt The Red Tent was more authentic. And I didn’t even really like that one.
The good points: I liked how he balanced the four women. That’s a hard task, one that he did manage to pull off (in spite of my complaints). In my opinion, he tilted the scales in favor of Leah and Zilpah, rather than Rachel, as expected. I liked Leah, in the end, more than Rachel (perhaps that’s what he was going for in order to explain the whole wedding deception thing?). She was more honest, more forthright, more interesting. Maybe that’ll change in the next book.
In the end, I don’t know how I really think about this book. Nothing seems to leap to mind. Which is sad. Because Card can be a vibrant, exciting writer. I guess not just about Biblical women. (Maybe it’s that whole men writing about women thing again…)
The Book Nut 
Have I said this before here? I think Card’s strenght is in storytelling, and I think he would be a better playwright than a novelist. I don’t buy his women either. Especially the biblical ones. But I also didn’t like The Red Tent, and I also didn’t like Madeleine L’Engle’s Certain Women, which was about David’s wives. Maybe it’s the subject matter–who can know what those women talked about? How they felt? There is no record at all. No matter how you try you’d be modernizing them.
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I think you have it right on the nose. Personally I don’t think he knows how to write women. I have the same problem with how he characterizes Emma in Saints.
Still I find the books interesting and the approach a different take. I like the Idea of Leah being near sighted in being tender eyed.
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Yes, Inkling, I think you have said that here before. And, I agree. That is, after all, where he got his start.
Perhaps, my problem isn’t so much with Card as it is with the general trend for writing up Biblical women’s stories. On the one hand, it is fascinating to muse about the possibilities in the stories. On the other hand, there’s something that rings false, at least to me, in the attempt.
I agree, tigersue. I liked the way he treated Leah. Too often, in reading the Genesis account, I get the feeling that Leah’s underestimated.
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