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Finally, each of the "revelations" about the book were heavy-handed and carried out with creaking slowness. The dialogue was stilted and the historical vignettes never really seemed like more than fingernail sketches; I couldn't get into anybody's stories. This was, surprisingly, a bad book. The main character was highly unlikable and never grew out of her unlikability, and all the other characters seemed like cardboard cutouts who never came alive.
Each chapter told a short story that explained each artifact that Hanna found. I wanted to know what happened in between each short story.
How did the deaf-mute boy end up bartering away his copy of the images when we last saw him safely ensconced with his family. Where did the Haggadah go from Father Vistorni's hands.
I was surprised at the end of the book to find out that this author also wrote The Year of Wonders which I did not enjoy at all. I found some of these stories gripping and I couldn't wait to finish them and others felt like they were dragging on.I know that this is supposed to imitate real life so of course not everything would be explained but the book left me wanting more.
Where did Zahra go.All in all even with the slow parts I would recommend this book. I'm glad to say I had a much higher opinion of this book.As I was reading the book I alternated between thinking this was a great book and thinking I would never get through it.
Like when she was pursuing the clue about the insect wing we got a short story that went back in history to explain where the wing came from.
When I got to detailed descriptions of the Inquisition, I put this book back on the shelf for good. Well, call me a weanie but I didn't finish this book. To be sure, it is beautifully crafted and well written, but each of the stories is more depressing and more gruesome than the last.
But Brooks is a fine historian and she gathers together a lot of good facts; she is a good story teller, capable of wrapping those acts in a drapery of fun and froth, or blood and gore. Her main characters profess to love books -- to be People of the Book -- but we never find out why. She does not open anything up to her readers that is particularly new or beautifully acute and accurate. Despite the gaff in location, that chapter was rendered with a lighter touch, and a richer emotional range (if we ignore the rape scene and the totally unbelievable lesbian interlude) than any of the other historical chapters. Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book is a good story, full of everything I like: history and mystery, religion and bravery, and a good dose of female heroism.
In addition, the heroine of that chapter actually seemed like a living and breathing person, not some Madame Tussaud wax figure.Brooks' book has a good story. Even her narrator is a flat and unbelievable structure (common to best sellers) and the narrator's mother and recently discovered father, even worse. I wish she could have trusted all of us more to tell the story without telling us what we should think; I wish she could have given us more complex and real characters we could have identified with and cheered on; and I wish she had offered a fresh and meaningful observation into why we should not be burning books, but reading them. For more reviews, go to www.readallday.org I would guess that the best chapters -- the ones most true and moving and fresh -- are based on her favorite, if not best, areas of research. In contrast, the initial chapter set in Sarajevo in 1996 was very real and alive, and I loved the chapter set in Seville in 1480 (although should not the setting have been Granada.
But the chapters read unevenly, with fast-paced and engaging passages followed by leaden and clichéd portrayals, especially the chapter devoted to the Jewish Partisans fighting under Tito and the absolutely ridiculously written chapter set in turn of the century Vienna (the dialog alone, both the interior words of the narrator and the words he exchanges with others, had me hooting in disbelief).Not that any of Brooks' writing is entirely free of clichés or hackneyed phrasing and pacing. Everything is in superlatives: uber-successful surgeon, famous and fabulous artist, most determined restorer of books with a PhD from Harvard (of course) willing to spend months and months learning how to make parchment (or grind berries or whatever), and yet the world's meanest mom (and youngest chair of the neurosurgery department) gives her not one damn iota of respect. That is were the Emir lived, and I believe Brooks is referring to the beautiful Alhambra which is in Granada and not in Seville, as the place where the slave girl is sent to paint the Emir's lover). Her writing is suitable to the telling of a story but not for sketching a genuine moment in time or expressing an original vision of the past. She herself admits it is hard to tell again the story of Jewish persecution under the Nazis and she does not do a good job of it. Subtlety is not one of Brooks' virtues: she likes to slam us over the head with her characters and the situations they find themselves in.
Nor is Brooks much good at character development: her figures tend to be just that, figures meant to represent a certain type of person or a certain place in time. Etc., etc.
Brooks has not previously shown us. But the strength of the story interwoven among the story of the prior book's owners is a wonderful creative flair that Ms. Read this to find out what has happened to the previous book owners, the history of Jewish people in Southern Europe, and an interesting Australian rare book expert. This book is the author's best book. As with her other books, her voice immediately immerses the reader in the story.
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