Ashley's review
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Ashley's review
rating:
bookshelves: mysteryshelf
recommended for: people who love libraries, history, and vampires
rating:
bookshelves: mysteryshelf
recommended for: people who love libraries, history, and vampires
this is a good book. it's not a great book, but it's very good. it's a well-crafted dive into several layers of historical imagination. at each stage the reader is navigated through dense historical investigations, including some delicious research in all kinds of libraries, by way of first-person narratives. this is a very effective way of communicating a great deal of information to the reader. and you have to appreciate this novel's unwillingness to simplify for a wide public. at any rate, as a reader, you don't need to follow the complexities too closely most of the time. this is, after all, a mystery driven by a strange threat, dracula himself, tracked through layers of historical information and layers of folkloric traditions, back and back, until the fanged menace himself begins to take shape. at certain points, this book is actually very creepy to read. it's this combination of goosebumps and rich descriptions of archives that i especially like!
