My feelings about this book are a bit all over the place! With four of Solomon’s wives featured as characters, I suspected I might struggle with the story on some level, but one of the things I love about fiction is that it gives me the opportunity to put myself in someone else’s shoes and understand their motives, even if I wouldn’t have made the same choices.

The biggest way this book did that for me was in showing how Solomon could convince himself that he was heeding God’s wisdom even as he continued following many of the world’s practices—like building a harem. A King’s power was often at least partly demonstrated by the size of his harem, and offering and accepting foreign women as wives was a common means of making political alliances and securing peace. In this story, Solomon acknowledged God’s warning not to take multiple wives but justified his harem as a political necessity and placated his conscience by ensuring that he didn’t allow his wives to turn him from worshipping God.

I also began to understand that the gift of wisdom can be a double-edged sword. It can blend with human wisdom so imperceptibly that we can be deceived into believing we are still fully heeding God’s wisdom when in fact we’re relying on our own, as happened with Solomon. My only complaint here is that I felt as though this theme didn’t become clear until towards the end.

Where I struggled with this story was with the wives, as I suspected, but not for the reasons I anticipated. Firstly, I felt as though there was no closure to their stories. Each wife was featured in turn in the lead-up to her marriage to Solomon but then faded out of the story, and seemingly his life, as the next wife came along. I know there are novellas corresponding to these characters that give a fuller account of their stories (The Desert Princess, The Shepherdess, Daughter of the Nile, and The Queen of Sheba), so maybe I need to read those to get better closure, but I found their stories dissatisfying in the context of The Heart of a King.

My other difficulty was the fact that Solomon spoke love poetry (essentially, passages from Song of Songs) to each of these women when he wooed them, and yet he didn’t seem to love any of them with the depth his words implied. At times it even felt as though he knew he was doing lip service rather than giving expression to his heart. I’m not sure I can quite put into words how that made me feel about Song of Songs—perhaps disillusioned?—but it wasn’t a feeling I welcomed.

No, it hasn’t escaped my notice that the probable author of the world’s most famous love poetry was also married to 600+ women—hardly the idealistic ‘one true love’ scenario—but I would have much preferred to have felt that he genuinely believed the words and his love each time he spoke them, even if he did speak them to more than one woman throughout his life.

I’m a huge fan of biblical fiction and have enjoyed many of Jill Eileen Smith’s books in the past, but this one definitely left me with mixed feelings.