I'm continuing with my Frightful Friday series even though Spooky Season is over. To quote The Nightmare Before Christmas, life's no fun without a good scare!
The endurance of the vampire myth is as fascinating as the creatures themselves. Audiences seem willing to give a hearing to even the lame, sparkly ones. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a robust retelling of the Dracula tale, is anything but feeble.
The protagonist is a young woman raised by her professor father. She presumes her mother died because her father rarely speaks of her. After he disappears, our heroine pieces together her family history, which inconceivably connects to Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure at the heart of Dracula lore. In searching her father's personal archive for clues to his whereabouts, she learns of her parents' quest to save a beloved mentor. Following in their footsteps, she doggedly goes after her father, the only family she has left.
Spanning decades and continents, the story is as exciting as any in the Indiana Jones franchise.
If you enjoy treasure hunts, history, and geography, this is a book for you. It's a richly woven tapestry of people and places stained by Dracula, some more far flung than one would expect. It's a web of connections that appear as coincidences to some, but are actually pieces of a larger pattern. If you're looking for jump scares and innocents being dragged away in the night, then you might be disappointed with this book.
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