My Review for The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
@megbatsbooks and myself read The Historian a couple of months ago. It's a chonk at over 700 pages long 📖 and while I enjoyed it, it wasn't the easiest book to read. For me, the main issue was that there was no indication of which timeline we were reading or who was narrating.
If you are a Dracula fan 🧛♂️ then you're definitely going to find this interesting. However, there is a lot of history and a lot of research topics in the story and, quite honestly, it would have been a lot more enjoyable (at least for me) if it was half the length with less waffle. 😂
I would have liked more from the daughter's point of view and how she followed her father across Eastern Europe, experiencing the strange phenomena that were taking place, rather than just getting a snippet here and there. 🗺️👀
I know that @megbatsbooks loved it though, and it was fun to read it with her because she picked up on way more things than I did. Definitely stuff I would have missed out on if she hadn't pointed them out! 🥰📚
If time and my TBR allow, I may give this another try in the future, but as an audiobook instead. 🎧 Who knows, I might gel more with it if I'm listening.
Thank you @megbatsbooks for another great buddy read — here's to the next one! 🥂📖❤️
About the Book
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. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.
The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. 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. 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.
Elizabeth Kostova was born in Connecticut in 1964. She is the author of four novels, The Historian (Little, Brown, 2005), The Swan Thieves (Little, Brown, 2010), The Shadow Land (Random House, 2017), and Mystery Play (Ballantine, 2026).
The Historian was the first debut novel in U.S. publishing history to debut at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, has been translated into 40 languages, and won Quill and Independent Bookseller Awards. The Swan Thieves was also a New York Times Bestseller and has been translated into 28 languages.
Her short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in such periodicals and anthologies as The Mississippi Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Best American Poetry, The Michigan Quarterly, and Another Chicago Magazine. Kostova has taught in programs at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the University of Michigan, Drexel University, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and Penn State-- as well as at the Sozopol Seminars on the Bulgarian Black Sea and Bear River Writers’ Conference in northern Michigan.
She reads and lectures internationally and is co-founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which provides competitive opportunities for Bulgarian writers and translators, as well as opportunities for native-English writers to travel to Bulgaria. Kostova is the recipient of honorary citizenship in the towns of Sozopol, Bulgaria and Tvedestrand, Norway, as well as a Bulgarian Ministry of Culture Award and a Lois Roth Foundation Citizen’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy. She holds a B.A. in British Studies from Yale College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won Hopwood Awards in both fiction and non-fiction.
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