People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Reading this novel makes me want to go take a book-binding class. It's the story of a Hebrew prayer book that survives through the centuries, and the people who created it and helped to preserve it. The book travels from Moorish Spain to Italy to Sarajevo. The narrative alternates between a modern archivist, which is told in first person, and historical sections told in third person omniscient.

I'm a big fan of Brooks. I loved March and her plague novel. This one is not quite as engaging. It's a little slow to develop - give it time. The omniscient sections were a little distant and sometimes hard to follow. Some details of the story toward the end seemed a little contrived - it might have been better to gloss over a lot of the details throughout the book. Readers are so willing to suspend disbelief as long as writers don't be obvious in explaining things.

But I loved it. Highly recommended.