The Historian
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.80 (698 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B000E0LDRU |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 227 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-02-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also. If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. 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
Homage to Stoker's Dracula is a good read Relying heavily on found written accounts and correspondence, The Historian is an homage to Stoker's novel as much as a retelling of the Dracula legend. The characters and the way they are drawn in to the reality and threat of vampires to all who uncover their existence is engrossing. The reader also gets to know these vampire hunters much better than Stoker's statues of Victorian manly and. "One of my all-time favorite books" according to Jennifer S. This was the first "adult" novel I read as a child, and it's still a book I come bakc to over and over as one of my favorites. I absolutely love fantasy novels that are heavily grounded in history and this book covers such a unique area of history, and accurately. The writing is superb and manages to stitch together multiple timelines seamlessly. It covers bits of history from Vlad the Impa. "An Epistolary Extreme" according to Angela Smith. At the outset I would've given this book at 5 star review, but about the time I hit 60%, my impression of Kostova declined from thinking she had produced a work in the same vein as _Frankenstein_ and _Dracula_ to thinking she had rendered a lazy imitation of either. I can willingly suspend my disbelief to enjoy the plot line, but the letters. Argh, the letters! Who hurriedly writes a letter
What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed-and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign-and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions-and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad's ancient powers-one woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself-to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, an