The Historian in Pick-a-Shelf

Sep 13, 2008 Kellie rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2006-reads

Phew. This was a long one. My personal opinion...way too long. I not sure why an editor would want a book like this to be as long as it is. I think I would have liked it better if it was shorter. The descriptions of the various countries, their cultures and geography was interesting. The story is very intriguing. It just seemed to drag in various places through out the book. I think people will enjoy it if they have the endurance for it. The story is about modern day Dracula. It is sometimes dif Phew. This was a long one. My personal opinion...way too long. I not sure why an editor would want a book like this to be as long as it is. I think I would have liked it better if it was shorter. The descriptions of the various countries, their cultures and geography was interesting. The story is very intriguing. It just seemed to drag in various places through out the book. I think people will enjoy it if they have the endurance for it. The story is about modern day Dracula. It is sometimes difficult to follow. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also. As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union. ...more

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Sep 22, 2008 Tien rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This book is a spin off of Bram Stoker's Dracula set in a new era with new spins to the vampire lores. It begins with a young girl who found a strange book along with an even stranger letter which prompted her to ask her father for the story behind these items. The stories told spans 3 generations (her grandparents, her parents, and her own).

The book is written almost in the same format as Dracula; that is in the form of letters & journal entries. However it has some narratives also.

The first ha ...more

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Mar 26, 2009 Sunflower rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-read-2009, library, historical-fiction

For a so-called horror story this one is rather gracious. And not even mildly scary. A very long whodunit, involving two generations of one unlucky family plus assorted other intellectuals known to them, and travels over much of Europe. This book must have needed a lot of research on the author's part, and the title tells you exactly what you get; a history. And I agree with other reviewers, *watch out, spoiler ahead* Dracula is a librarian? That's right up there with God being a woman who bakes ...more

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Aug 17, 2008 Slayermel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller, favorites, fiction, mystery, fantasy, historical-fiction, vampires, book-club, paranormal, 21st-century

I really enjoyed this book, what a great detailed story. The amount of history, woven in with details of countries, cultures and historical sites is amazing. I enjoyed every page of this novel. The characters where completely believable and likable. I felt like I was right there with them on their journey. There where several times where I was so engrossed in the book that my phone rang and I jumped out of my skin. :op

I will definitely be reading more about Vlad the Impaler as I found parts of ...more

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