A nice book, but perhaps not worth the hype. I enjoyed the prose… the author does have a nice way with the language, and I definitely empathised with the few characters that we got to meet at all. I at turns enjoyed and was put off by the flipping back and forth between points of view (and decades), but thought it an effective way to tell the story. Also, while not overtly horrific, there were a few points at which I was distinctly uneasy – Kostova managed our fear well, in spite of our knowledge of certain characters’ ultimate fates.