McLarty reads the Thecla episode from the apocryphal Acts of Paul in comparison to Chariton's pagan romance Callirhoe to understand how portrayals of emotion in the plot and characterization of the Thecla narrative indicate the formation of Christian identity. McLarty analyzes literary-rhetorical evocations of emotion and characterization of the emotional life of characters in the Thecla narrative to illuminate the inner life of early Christians. Through comparison with Callirhoe, McLarty is able to explore ways the Thecla narrative attempts to construct a uniquely Christian way of mastering emotion by showing how it departs from typical plot and character expectations in the Greco–Roman romantic novel genre.

McLarty's argument proceeds in two main sections: the first dealing with plot, the second examining characterization. The first section contains a detailed plot comparison between book 1 of Callirhoe and the Thecla narrative, using diachronic and synchronic approaches. The diachronic approach in chapter 3 focuses first on the overall shape of the plot (which McLarty calls its “teleology”), then on points of tension in the plot where the reader encounters possible divergence from the plot's apparent telos, and finally on apparent causation of the overall narrative arc. The synchronic approach in chapters 4 and 5 attends to issues of time, space, and place in Callirhoe and the Thecla narrative. McLarty's approach draws attention to ways in which the diachronic plot creates tension with the synchronic elements of the plot. The second section undertakes an analysis of characterization in Callirhoe and the Thecla narrative, respectively, following the ancient approach of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and related modern methodologies of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Mieke Bal, and Jonathan Culpeper, attending to both narratological and sociological insights in character creation.

McLarty's diachronic approach in the first section generates helpful points of comparison and contrast, especially concerning the differences between the plot trajectories of Callirhoe and Thecla that mark the Thecla narrative as a “counter-cultural text” (94). While there is a necessarily tight focus and synthetic nature to such scholarly limitations, McLarty's choice to reduce her plot summaries to “kernel elements … that ‘cannot be deleted without destroying the narrative logic’” (46, quoting Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978], 53), and her choice to compare the Thecla narrative only to book 1 of Callirhoe leaves the analysis open to questions of methodological sufficiency. Most specifically, one might hope for a more thorough treatment of the entire plot of Callirhoe in chapter 3, even if the final analysis retained its focus on book 1. Additionally, further comparison to other Greco-Roman novels in the conclusion to the first section of McLarty's book might have strengthened her enlightening and tight argument. Nevertheless, McLarty's care to enumerate and defend these choices provides other careful scholars with helpful means to engage in alternative analyses of the two chosen works. Additionally, through her focus on the telos of each plot, McLarty clearly demonstrates the parallels between Callirhoe's marriage and Thecla's baptism.

The greatest insights of the first section of McLarty's argument arrive in her treatment of the synchronic plot elements, specifically her focus on space and place in chapter 5, following Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, locations that function as “alternative societies for those who have transgressed the cultures rules,” such as prisons, cemeteries, gardens, and ships (103–104). Through this exploration, McLarty is able to demonstrate how the place of “home”—so foundational to a Greco-Roman ideal as presented in Callirhoe—is “lost and transferred to the place of gospel proclamation” (119) in the Thecla narrative, prioritizing new communities as in the households of Onesiphorus and Thamyris.

This insight leads into McLarty's nuanced treatment of characterization in the second section of the book. There McLarty pays particular attention to questions of social location, including gender, in her treatments of plot and characterization. McLarty's attention to social location provides a welcome counterbalance to the preponderance of primarily gender-oriented studies of the Acts of Thecla. In her own approach, combining social considerations with questions of gender and emotional characterization, McLarty is able to present a complex picture not only of Thecla but of Paul as well. This further allows McLarty to explore the portrayal of the Christian community as both a new family and a new polis. Furthermore, McLarty's combined emphasis on emotion in both plot and characterization allows an image to emerge of an ideal reader who more closely resembles the more domesticated counter-cultural Christians in the narrative such as Onesiphorus and Thamyris rather than the more radical characters of Paul and Thecla.

McLarty's study is a welcome addition to the growing body of Thecla literature. Her nuanced portrayal of numerous social factors of characterization represents a maturation of Thecla research, building upon but attenuating earlier more extreme interpretations of Thecla's place in early Christian identity formation, as in Dennis Ronald MacDonald's, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Westminister, 1983), Virginia Burrus's Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts (E. Mellen Press, 1987), or Stephen J. Davis's work, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2001). Thecla's Devotion, a lightly revised version of McLarty's 2011 doctoral thesis, unfortunately was composed prior to, but published later than, Susan Hylen's A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (Oxford University Press, 2015), a more broadly focused companion to McLarty's work. The insights of either work might have been deepened if either author had recourse to the other's research. Nevertheless, along with Hylen's work and Scott F. Johnson's Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study (Harvard University Press, 2006), McLarty's book provides careful literary analysis and close comparative reading that would be useful to students of late antiquity, New Testament, early Christianity, classics, as well as gender studies.