A good mix of traditional and new
- Book: The Historian
- Location: Europe
- Author: Elizabeth Kostova
I liked this read a lot, because it felt like a good old-fashioned Gothic novel, but had modern scenes and younger-modern-person perspectives as well (diplomat’s daughter in the Netherlands visits Oxford and has a crush in the 1970s was one of the weaker storylines, but still fair). It DID take a while before I got into it, but then I was racing forward, back, and across the globe with each narrator!
It used two formulaic structures, epistolary and flashback, to weave the story, which I found exciting and successfully suspenseful. What made me give it 5 stars for location were the little details dropped in about Istanbul and villages in Romania, Bulgaria, Cold War Budapest– it was a travelogue of specific snapshots in time as well as different locations, and masterful!
I would recommend this book to people who like Gothic tales, people yearning for something Bronte-esque or 19th century moral victories, people who enjoy experimental story structure, and those who have visited eastern Europe and feel a twinkling in their heart about going back… this will feed it!
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