The research was admirable, although I question the author's decision to include certain historical documents, rather than interpreting them for the reader. I get it, I get it, the book is called The Historian, because the main characters are all historians and that's why she chose to include too much detail. Duh. Nevertheless, there were too many moments where I felt bogged down in a swamp of wordiness rather than feeling like I was effortlessly swimming through brilliant prose.

It had so much potential. I had such high hopes for it. About four hundred pages in I never thought I'd finish it and it was about that time that I grew tired of repetitive, lazy writing, overuse of words and expressions such as, "We ate heartily..." and "The room was dingy," or "We came to a dingy part of the city," where they "ate heartily a feast of Turkish delights."* That sort of thing. I'm just saying, there were very vivid moments where I could tell from the writing that the author was bored of describing scenes, where I knew she was just trying to get to the good part but she had to go through all these other stupid, inane scenes of people at a party or traveling through the countryside. That was when the writing was lifeless and dull and I felt like I was reading stage directions or something.

Not to mention the whole fact that I could really believe in a real life (or undead, anyway) Dracula more than I would EVER believe that some forty-year-old guy sat down and wrote letters in explicit first-person detail to his daughter. First of all, no one has a memory that good and so he was fictionalizing his own history without ever admitting to that. Would a "historian" do that? No, that's what authors do.

I guess the point is that I'll never understand Kostova's choice of letters as the method of telling the story, rather than an omniscient third person narrator. That would have worked better. But, there again, I found it difficult to believe that a man felt and thought all the things this male character did.

I apologize for being so critical because I think she did a wonderful job with the research and for many scenes I thought the writing excellent. I also found that some of the city descriptions were fabulous and they definitely made me want to visit the places featured in the book. However, the sum total was a Dracula-Da Vinci Code in one package. I'm sorry, but, there it is.



*I made this sentence up. It never, to my knowledge, makes an appearance in the novel. Not in so many words. But it certainly COULD have been in there.