A number of historians find mysterious dragon books that propel them on a search for the historic Dracula.

Pretty much everything. I was wanting a suspenseful novel about vampires. I got a bore. 700 pages that should have been more like 300.
     
Problems:
     
1. First person narration from the point of view of a daughter who is completely dropped as a character halfway through the novel. What? How does that happen? Easy. You tell the whole story through letters from the father to the daughter. The problem is she's still the narrator, and what's the point of even having her in there if she's not a character for most of the story. Oh...yes, BTW, after dropping her character she shows up randomly a little later to describe her first sexual experience. How about that for random?
     
2. Too many Historians. Not sure who the title is referring to...although probably to Dracula. Every character in this book is a historian. Even characters who aren't. Even minor characters. Librarians. Anthropologists. Monks. Bureaucrats - who seem to want to share with us how coffee made it to Budapest. Yeah, yeah, who cares? The author obviously did a lot of research, which is admirable, but not all of it is relevant to the story and not all of it needs to be included.
     
3. Dracula is confusing. The author can't make up her mind if Vlad Dracula is a good guy or a bad guy. First he's impaling people's heads, then he's protecting his homeland against the Turks. She seems only to want to show what history shows and not add anything interesting. She never explain how he became a vampire which I thought would have been a nice descriptive scene if nothing else.
     
4. TOO MUCH FILLER. On top of all of this she seems to go into a Victor Hugo like detail about every city these people visit. I don't even think Hugo gets away with this very well, so my impression of her travelogue (which is what it amounts to) is pretty poor. The one redeeming value of it is that it is largely an American experiencing communist countries during the height of the Cold War.

Throw it away.

Like I wasted my time in the worst way. Isn't that awful? Reading is supposed to be so rewarding!

Is lucky anyone is reading this book. I hope she continues to write and get better. She has a long way to go.

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Created Feb 06, 2007 at 7:48pm • Submit your own review...