The Book of Blood and Shadow, by Robin Wasserman

Warning: If you don't want to read a long negative book review, well, this is that.  However, if you want to find out why I don't think this book is very good, you should check my review out.  

Here’s the thing about this book: after reading it, I can gauge what reading audience will probably enjoy it.  I was looking forward to reading it because I had not read a mystery á la The Da Vinci Code in a while and the premise seemed interesting. 

It ended up being one of the worst books I read this year.  It was very disappointing; and yes, I read the whole book.  I got invested in it enough that I decided to power through and read to the end.

There are several problems with the story and the characters, and they are interrelated.  I will focus on what I think are the major ones.  From the beginning, it is established that Nora, the main character, is a high school senior and accomplished Latin translator who lives with her parents, neither of whom seem to take a significant interest in her upbringing, due mainly to the death of her older brother several years earlier.  She is a part-time volunteer research assistant at the nearby university along with one of her best friends and her boyfriend.  Her other best friend is also a high school senior.  Unfortunately, these characters were portrayed so one-dimensionally that I didn’t really get a sense of them as people; they seemed more like props to keep the story and the mystery going.  When the author did attempt to infuse some life into the characters, it felt awkward and confusing.  I did not see why I should care about any of the characters and what they were doing.  Even though one of them is murdered (this is not quite a spoiler, since Nora mentions it within the first few chapters), I got the impression that Nora was more concerned about mitigating her own implied guilt in the event rather than genuine anger and sadness about the death.  It is hard to tell what everyone’s motivations are, and nobody grows or undergoes some other kind of transformation by the end of the story.

The way the characters are able to follow the clues, so to speak, to unravel the mystery, is also unclear.  Though everyone is supposed to be really smart and knowledgeable about different languages and cultures and history, I was not convinced of it, mainly because the characters were already poorly drawn and not well developed.  It does not always make sense how the characters arrive at their conclusions and so neatly go from place to place and always find a document or a message or a key person essential to the mystery. 

Finally, there are a few significant “reveals” toward the end of the book that do not make sense in the context of this story because the author does not establish at the beginning that these kinds of events could happen in this world or that yes, there is a more than 90% possibility that these characters might actually be more than they say they are.  These “reveals” are written too hastily.  I literally groaned aloud at Starbucks (my boyfriend gave me a sympathetic look; he understands because sometimes he has to watch bad movies in order to see why good movies are so good).   

Here is why I think Twilight is a better book (and we’re not talking about writing quality; it’s strictly style and content): 1) Though Bella and Nora are both self-pitying and can be very insufferable, Bella is more fleshed out and believable as a character within a story and not as a device to move the story forward; 2) people and events within the Twilight universe make sense in the context of the universe because Stephenie Meyer establishes that these people could exist and these events could occur within this universe; and 3) Meyer constructs and paces the story consistently and logically.  True, I would go cross-eyed at Bella’s pages and pages of Edward-longing, but at least it made sense for her character.  Parts of Blood and Shadow are plain boring and unnecessary.  The author’s writing style is meandering: it seems as if the author is still trying to figure out what her writing style is by the end of the book. 

All in all, The Book of Blood and Shadow consists of a lot of pages that tell a story of not much.  I will not stop you from reading it if your curiosity wins out.  To be perfectly honest, though, there are better books out there.