These are real questions and you should feel free to see in them my deep regret that I stopped taking Latin after high school. I loved Latin! I have no idea why I was so hell-bent on getting a degree in English when I could have gotten one in classical studies and taken cooler classes and hung out with cooler people. (This is not a referendum on English majors or classics programs everywhere. I’m talking about my university only.) And then I could have said with authority that a protagonist in flight from the terror behind would just translate it as “Philosophers and mathematicians ask how the universe is arranged” because that’s what the straight translation would be and she would be much too frightened to start getting cute with appositives.

(Sometimes when I wasn’t crazy about a book I take a really long time to start talking about it in the blog post I am writing about it. I know that’s a thing I do.)

The Book of Blood and Shadow is about a girl called Nora who’s working on a translation project with her best friend Chris and her boyfriend Max, and it turns out the book they’re translating is of The Greatest Significance to History, so much so that people would kill for it. So one day Nora comes over to Chris’s and finds him dead and his girlfriend in a state of catatonia, and Max has vanished and is under suspicion of murder. Nora knows that he did not do it and embarks on a journey across Europe to clear his name by translating important letters that uncover a conspiracy stretching across space and time.

I’m not sure it’s worthwhile to rehearse the manifold sillinesses of a book like this. It’s a Dan Browny sort of thing where religion and history are involved, and everyone wants to find a MacGuffin and destroy it or release it upon the world. Nora could go to the police but she never does because they wouldn’t believe her (of course), and she thinks that her getting more involved in the MacGuffin hunt will convince the crazed killers to leave her alone. She has information they will kill to get their hands on/destroy, but she does not Xerox her original manuscript copy of the information and distribute it on street corners so that her possessing it will cease to be of specific interest to the crazed killers. There are so many things a sensible person would do that Nora does not do! Once she and her friends get to Prague they are always splitting up (despite the ongoing threat of crazed killers) and I felt like that part in Cabin in the Woods where they suggest splitting up and the stoner guy is like, “…Really?”

What I’m doing right now is complaining about the silly aspects of a book I read because I wanted to read something silly and fast-paced. I can do that. I am capricious that way. Besides, there are fast-paced books in this world where the protagonists at least try to go to the police. Or at least where they do not withhold from the police key pieces of evidence and send each other cryptic coded graveyard messages when it would be much much easier to get a burner phone and call from that.

Many other reviews exist. I was not early to this party.

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