rebeccatc 's review for:

The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova

4.0

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This story begins with a young American woman who travels to Bulgaria in 2008 to escape the grief she is experiencing after the death of her brother. In Sofia, she accidentally takes a satchel containing the ashes of a man named Stoyan Lazarov, a violinist. Aided by a somewhat mysterious taxi driver named Bobby, she sets off to try to return the man's remains to his family. The story jumps around in time and is told in pieces by various side characters and, eventually, Stoyan's journal. It takes quite some time to come to the point, which is that Stoyan was imprisoned in a Communist labor camp in the 1950s. The entire book has an air of melancholy, relieved by the caring relationships between the characters and punctuated by the horrors of the labor camp. I did find the jumping around both in time and geography to be somewhat jarring and distracting. Alexandra is a little unbelievable but Bobby was a very likeable and intriguing character.