People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you've loved The Shadow of the Wind, The Book Thief, The Reader, 84 Charing Cross Road here's another book you will enjoy.

Before I begin my review of the Book about a Book, let me talk about how it came to me. Much like the Sarajevo Haggadah, my copy of People of the Book, too, travelled all the way from Montana, USA, to Solan, India: the most wonderful birthday gift from my dear fellow Oxon, Natalia Kolnik, to whom the book originally belonged and who was kind enough to send me her copy.

Reading it was, therefore, doubly fun because Natalia had marked her favourite bits in the book and so, when I marked mine, the book began to carry a bit of our own history, a part of our souls. (Talk about The Shadow of the Wind nostalgia!)

I think, after a very long time, I have fallen so much in love with a book. To start with, this book is a perfect part of myself: a bit of history and a bit of literature, love for the past and a passion for stories. No book could summarise the half archaeologist, half literature nerd that I am, as well as this one.

No book has brought back to me Daniel Sempere, Liesl Meminger or Shosanna from Inglourious Basterds and reminded me what I love best about Natalie Dormer, especially her role as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors as this one. Trust me, Lola, Ruti, Zahra, Nura are all fabulous reminders of these other characters
and personally, I am going to treasure them as my fictional friends forever!

Why, then, did I dock off one star, you ask?
Because of Hanna Heath herself! Hanna, the one charcter who could have been me in the book, considering that she's a conservator who loves books, was a sheer disappointment. She's amazingly whiney, self pitying, self doubting charcter whose parts are the most BORING to read. As a result, I dragged through what I had originally expected to enjoy, sometimes even fell asleep or skipped entire bits, only to re-read them later. If the bits about Lola, Ruti and Zahra leave you wanting for more, the bits about Hanna make you wish they had never been written. Add the third rate 'Da Vinci Code'-esque end to Hanna's bit and you're almost tempted to rip the last few pages apart.

However, the merit of the subplots is way too high to judge the whole thing by Hanna Heath and her moping, miserable, maddening nonsense. Hence four stars and lots of good memories taken home from this beautiful book!

View all my reviews