The story of the church Book

Almost a three star effort; it is written well enough, and covers both the evidence for the legend and the ongoing controversy over its veracity exhaustively. Its main problem is that hard evidence either for or against the legend is scant, and most of what can be said about Pope Joan relies on nothing more substantial than circumstantial evidence. While this book checked in at under 200 pages, the relevant facts could have been easily dealt with in half of that. What remains feels like filler, attempting to flesh the idea out to appropriate book length. The author manages to make his filler interesting in the early going, but at about the half way mark it started to become increasingly tedious, to the point that I mainly skimmed the last third rather than reading it. I would still recommend the book as being useful to aficionados of the Pope Joan legend, but if you lack a burning interest, take a pass on reading this one.