People of the Book: A Novel

Book review by Jane
The primary focus of this book is a fictional journey through time of Sarajevo Haggadah, a prayer book for Jewish Passover Seder that lays out the Exodus for the Jewish families to understand and pass down for generations. This haggadah had survived through the 1492 Spanish Expulsion, the Inquisition, as well as skirmishes and modern wars of the area. The haggadah is real, while the stories offered around the book are fiction. The strongest point I realized as I read the book--and one of the points the author is obviously making--is that this book was shepherded by many different people of all the three main faiths that cannot seem to get along. The book came into existence at a time in history when these faiths co-existed, and survived because people of Catholic and Muslim faiths participated in carrying it on to the future generations.

Although the book is about a book, it is not boring. I liked the main character--an Australian woman who studied the Sarajevo Haggadah shortly after a bombing of their library in 1996. Hanna was outspoken and a loner all at once and had immense personal issues. The characters from the past that were just as rich and developed as Hanna, set with an urgency of adventure that I find more in modern tales than historic ones. I believe the author was able to bring this about because she focused on the characters as if she were writing a separate story--just with the same main theme as the book. Nice setup. I enjoyed it.

Geraldine Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize for March.

Jane.