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Just curious if anybody else has read this. I just finished it, and thought it was very good. Much better than "The Da Vinci" code for "mystery" books.
Posts: 450 | Registered: Sep 2005
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My biggest criticism was that the voices of the three narrators wasn't distinct enough; since I was reading it in little chunks whenever I had a few minutes, that was a problem, since it took me a while to get oriented as to whose story I was hearing. Had I read it in big blocks of time, with the luxery of only putting it down at natural breaks in the story, that might not even have registered with me.
Speaking of three narrators, the book is a skillfully handled example of weaving narratives in three different time periods together. Absolutely brilliant.
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It was well done. I admired the authors ability to tell the entire story in flashback, basically, and yet keep the rest of the "current" story incredibly relevant.
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It was big disappointment. Sometimes a long book feels not long enough, it's not good when a long books feels like it was too long. This is one of the later variety. I liked the various veiwpoints. I thought that aspect of the story was well done and it was easy to tell whose viewpoint was being presented.
I was especialy disappointed by the ending. A book this long should have a better pay-off. It was not clear to me what was the book she found at the end. The girl's sexual awakening with the college boy led nowhere and was not connected to the main narrative in any way. Not clear whether she even married the guy. The death of Dracula was anti-clamactic. The ending, in which she appears to imagine a meeting b/w Dracula and a monk was out of place. Essentially, the book ends with a day-dream. Not really appropriate for a book that is as much about historical scholarship as about vampires.
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