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04 July 2012

Book Review: The Historian


The HistorianThe Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Boy did I get suckered into this one.  I remember when this came out;  it was everywhere.  I'd just had a baby so I glanced at it several times and thought "That would be a fun DaVinci Code kind of read when I have time someday." Never picked it up.  Never even looked very carefully at the cover.

Then we bought a Nook so that we could travel with our precociously well-read 8 year old without hauling a steamer trunk of books along with us. I was perusing the e-books available at the library and this popped up.  "Perfect!" I thought.  "I'll read this on vacation!"

But wait. It's about VAMPIRES?

How the hell could I have missed that?

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through;  finding it ponderous, convoluted and stodgy but still engaging because of Kostova's ability to evoke a sense of place.  You can almost smell Istanbul. In a good way.

But what editor anywhere thought it would be a good idea to faithfully fictionalize a scholarly article about a 14th century travel log?  Zzzzzzzz.

And, wait.  Vampires?  Really?

And now I'm done and feel the need to edit the whole damn thing so that it has a sense of pacing and story arch.  

And, really? One lucky shot was enough?

BUT I did, in fact, read the whole thing, so that's saying something, I suppose.


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