The Historian

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova 4+ starsI have to qualify my review by saying that I don't usually read books in the vampire genre. I'm not a "Twilight" fan, a horror fan, or a fan of the glut of TV/movies that feature vampires and otherworldly creatures. I do enjoy a good gothic... a good scare... a good tale. And that's what this book is to me. It isn't a tale of vampires. It's a good story that happens to be about history's search for Vlad Dracula, and how that search affected many lives, but especially the lives of a young girl (16 when we meet her), her father Paul, and her absent mother, Helen.This book is more a book for people who love books... travel... other cultures... history. I'm not saying that the book is accurate in any sense of the word where any of those is concerned. After all, as a reader, I don't necessarily care to look up the images of vampires in Greece or the cultural rituals of holy days in Bulgaria. I want to read a good book - a tale told well, that engages my mind and makes me part of its pages. The Historian is a good book! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.The ending was perhaps a bit too neat for me, but after all the protagonists has suffered to get to the end, I could forgive a tidy, happy ending. Yes, some of the more in-depth discussion about places and histories was a bit much - even my eyes glazed over a time or two. But the book sets itself up from the 1st paragraph as exactly what it is. Only a foolish reader actually believes that anything in this book is absolute history; it's a novel!