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 - OK, but not a favoriteI just read People of the Book on a one-week vacation. It certainly held my interest and was a quick read. But I felt the book could have been more. While it was rescued repeatedly, the Haggadah also resided for many years in safe places. I would have liked her to focus on some interesting positive times rather go from one disaster to another. I am Jewish so I certainly understand the plight of the Jews through history. But I got tired of reading of political/religious massacres and wished that every vignette did not have to end with wrenching violence. Rating:  - A 10It has been a few months since I finished the novel, but the characters are still fresh in my mind and the plot, set over the course of several centuries, still captivates me. When I finished reading the novel, I was still having, "ah-hah" moments, having just then put together loose threads of the story. In other reviews, details are given about the story line itself. If those alone do not captivate you, then read this novel to see how well Geraldine Brooks can craft the English language into a poignant and vivid novel. This was the first book by Geraldine Brooks that I have read and I cannot wait to read her other works. Rating: - Not as much as I'd hoped...I have read one other book by Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders, which I liked, so I had high expectations for this book. When I first started reading People of the Book I was sure it was on track to be one of my top reads of the year. However, somewhere in the middle the story just started to lose momentum for me and I started to have trouble keeping the different storylines straight. I love the concept of a story told about an ancient text and I felt like I got a good snapshot of what was going on in each time period I visited. For that reason alone, I am glad I read this book. I love history. However, I found that the characters in some instances were not what I was hoping they would be and I was disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high but this was just okay to me. Rating:  - Poor account of historyIt was difficult to decide what was more disappointing: the poor narrative or the incredibly poor knowledge of the history in general, and of the region Ms. Brooks writes about in her "People of the Book". Since a lot has been said about the former in other reviews, I will comment on the latter. On p. 67 you will find a hilarious sentence ending with "...,yet following the forms of Petrarchan sonnets that had been carried inland from Diocletian's court on the Dalmatian coast." Diocletian retired to his palace on Dalmatian coast in 305 A.D. and died there in 311 A.D. Following his death, the palace was used as an administrative center and the governor's residence until, in 615, it became a refuge for the residents of Salona when their city was sacked by the Avars. In other words, there has been no "court" after Diocletion's death. And Petrarch... well he wasn't born until a thousand years later - in 1304. He wrote his most famous sonnets, those to Laura, between 1327 and 1368. Another "pearl" from the page 199 (Venice, 1609): the mysterious Doña Reyna de Serena plans to move to the Ottoman Empire..."They say the city of Ragusa is very lovely - not so lovely as Venice, to be sure, but at least it will be an honest life." The citizens of Dubrovnik, or lovely Ragusa would be horrified at this claim. They are namely very proud of the fact that the tiny city-state of Ragusa successfully balanced its sovereignty between the interests of Venice and the Ottoman Empire from the 14th century until 1808, when marshal Marmont abolished the republic and integrated its territory into the Illyrian provinces within the Napoleonic Empire. In other words, Ragusa has never been a part of the Ottoman Empire, although it welcomed many Jews exiled from Spain and Portugal. Rating: - engrossing, beautiful story for all book loversThe Sarajevo Haggadah of Pesach, one of the most mysterious and interesting Haggadot in the world, is at the center of Geraldine Brooks' novel "People of the Book". Haggadah, which means "telling" is a rabbinic exegesis the Jewish liberation from Egypt, as told in the Exodus book of the Torah, fulfilling the scriptural commandment to Jews to "tell your son" about this crucial event. It is used to set the order of the Passover Seder. The Sarajevo Haggadah, the oldest of the Sephardic Passover Haggadot, dating back to fourteenth century, is unusual - it is illuminated with beautiful, colorful illustrations, which is against the religious rule, forbidding making images of humans and animals. One of the illustrations shows the Jewsish family and a young, black woman at the same table, a puzzling and surprising picture. This unique property and the book's artistic value raise interest of many people, not only from the world of book conservation, but also political and religious fractions. When in 1996 thirty-year-old Hanna Heath, an extraordinarily gifted, Australian master book restorer, gets an urgent phone call from her teacher, Amitai, at 2 am, she is just annoyed, but the news is exciting. She is summoned to Sarajevo to assess the authenticity of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which has just resurfaced after being lost for years, found and rescued by the Muslim librarian, Ozren Karaman. Hanna begins working on the Haggadah with mixed feelings - she is in Bosnia in the middle of a religion-based conflict, closely watched by bank employees, bodyguards and UN officials, who distract her. She is also excited by the prospect of learning something about the history of the mysterious book. She carefully mends the booka and finds little details, which can be helpful: missing clasps, an insect's wing, a white hair, and a red stain. Pursuing these clues, she travels to Vienna and Boston, and learns a little about the journey of the book, making exciting hypotheses, which not always are true... Because of the novel's construction, the reader learns about the Haggadah more than Hanna would ever know. The chapter alternate between Hanna's studies and her point of view, and the history of the Haggadah, which brings the reader farther and farther back in time, starting with WWII, when the Jews are forced out of Bosnia, moving to the 19th century Vienna, when the book was re-bound, then to Venice of 1609, Spain of 1480, and finally Seville of 1409, getting to the core of the mystery of the illuminations. Each of the historical chapters is a gem of a story in itself, capturing the spirit of time and place, and introducing remarkable characters, each carrying a secret of their own. Based on facts about the miracle of the Sarajevo Haggadah's survival through the ages, Geraldine Brooks has woven a wonderful fictional story - or one of the versions of the truth. Hanna's story, which frames the history of Haggadah, is also not banal. Hanna discovers herself in a process of working on the Haggadah, finds and comes to terms with the love of her life, revises her relationship with her emotionally distant neurosurgeon mother, and learns of her father's family. "People of the Book" is a lot better than Zafon's "The Shadow of the wind" and infinitely better than anything by Dan Brown (in my opinion, it is similar to neither of these books, but I know that it has been compared to them). I devoured it in two wonderful evenings and would recommend it to anyone.
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