5. The Historian

By Elizabeth Kostova

Rating: 2 (656 pgs)

Our narrator is a teenage girl being raised by her father, an American diplomat. Through her recollections and the journals of her father, a story filled with mystery and dark overtones emerges. The novel takes us from America to Britain on to Turkey and into the Eastern Bloc. The story is sinister.

The Historian, I'm sorry to say, is a good story crippled by bad structure. Kostova's voice is well developed and engaging but the format she chose for the story hinders momentum and, in some places, breeds confusion. I have a hard time recommending this to people although, as I said, it is a good story. I will definitely pick up her next book, I feel Kostova is an author worth giving a second chance and may very well develop into a very good writer.

Not recommended.

The Ratings

To make life easier for me I've also devised a rating system. Every book gets a rating of 1-5 and here's what it means. (adapted from it's original form from the beginning of last year.)

5 - I loved it, I'm going to own it, I am in fact going to buy multiple copies and promote this book by handing them out for free at church socials and company picnics.

4 - I liked it. I definitely want to have a copy in my library and recommend it to most people.

3 - I liked it well enough, if I see a cheap used copy of it I'll snag it for my collection. I would recommend this book to some people or for specific reasons.

2 - I didn't hate, didn't like it either. I wouldn't generally recommend it to most people.

1 - I hated it or severely disliked it. There has to be a serious problem with the writing or the subject matter for a book to get this rating. In the last 2 years I've only run across 2 or 3 of these. The likelyhood that one of these will appear on the blog is pretty low since...why waste time on something so bad?