The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova - DNF

Wow this book held so much promise when I started it. I really liked the poetic way the author wrote, there was even a creepy scene in the book, but then it just kinda went south for me. It lost that flare and it's edge and then just seemed to be all over the place and really just turned into a complicated, monotonous read for me, therefore I did not finish it.

This is a story of a 16 year old girl, told by her older self. I am guessing the girl in the story is the actual author, since I don't even recall her having a name in the story. She throws herself into the history of her family in pursuit of the truth about Vlad the Impaler or otherwise known as Dracula.

With the synopsis I expected so much more from this book. I had high expectations that I would get a large dose of Dracula mixed in with a little history and it really was not the case. It was more like a lot of history with hints of Dracula, at least in the 300 pages that I read. Also I found the book rather confusing because it was hard to tell sometimes what time period I was reading about because it jumped around so much and I did not find that it was clearly marked letting me know. So I found myself going back several times and rereading portions of the book.

A large portion of the book was told by way of letters that the father wrote to his daughter and then letters wrote to the father, whatever his name was, from Bartholomew Rossi. I had a hard time deciphering what was letters and what was actually happening at the time. The history in this story was mostly research type history which is fine, but I would like to have a little bit of excitement mixed in. And I did not find that with this book. It started to read like an actual history lesson.

I did not really connect to any of the characters or really even like any of them. I found them a little dry and boring. And with all the jumping around from one 'set' of characters to the next, it was hard to keep them all straight at times. I don't know, they were kind of just there, nothing really memorable.


I have read historical novels that have been very good I think largely because there was much more than just history involved. I can't really recommend this to anyone unless you like very large doses of history and less adventure or excitement.