Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Reviews by Mr. Dark

If you'd like to be able to easily share your reviews with others, please join BookBrowse.
Order Reviews by:
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Eh... (4/14/2009)
Well, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. If you ask me, there's really not an awful lot to say. I was basically forced to read this book, all because I was surrounded in a society of Twilight fangirls that basically said "It's about vampires. It's thick. Let's read it!" so, you can predict my lack of enthusiasm from the very beginning. Despite this, it would still be incorrect to say that I was biased at any time, as I didn't fully know what to expect. Thus my reading began. Took me a couple of weeks to finish it. Wasn't incredibly hard to put it down afterward. The main problem with this book is its never-ending attempts to appear "plausible". I understand it fits into the story's theme about historians and factuality, but truly, it feels awkward reading like this in a novel with mostly fictional, baseless events. True, there is a load of text which could basically be interpreted as a history lesson on the war between Dracula and the Ottoman empire, but that doesn't necessarily improve the story's quality in any sense. On the plot itself, due to its tendency to add up tiny bits of story progress from each of the gazillion locations, it feels weak in more than one sense. More awkward moments come from when the context decides to throw a sudden romance straight at the reader. This, mixed with the multiple plotline dispersion (a rather poorly organized aspect) and the overall weakness of the plot, makes it seem more desperate than anything else. Another of the main motifs, the presence of vampires, is unbelievably underwhelming. Aside from Dracula, there is no more than ONE potentially dangerous vampire in the book. More additions to the letdown include opinions on descriptions with absolutely no relevance to the plot or theme, lack of clarity on several elements, constant dispersion and fault to keep consistency, some poorly constructed story arcs.

On the plus side, though, the book was a half-good piece of info dinner for anyone with an interest on dracula or vampire myths, and at least the plot manages to hold together throughout the length of the story. Regardless of one's interest in reading it, it feeds its reader some curious data on medieval europe that may seem interesting to the cultivated, along with the aforementioned mythical elements.

Overall, it's passable. Can't really focus too much on the negative or positive aspects, because they practically eat each other up. I believe that's the best way to describe it in a nutshell Well, this has been my personal review. Signing out for now.
  • Page
  • 1

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    "I cannot say why it is so important that I make this daily record. Perhaps because I have been ...
  • Book Jacket
    Prophet Song
    by Paul Lynch
    Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song is a speedboat of a novel that hurtles...
  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Book Jacket
The Story Collector
by Evie Woods
From the international bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop!
Who Said...

Beware the man of one book

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.