This was a book that I didn’t intend to read. I was scrolling through my TBR list in Libby and saw The Book of Blood and Shadow. The title reminded me of a typical YA Fantasy novel, which I wasn’t in the mood for. I was going to remove this book from my TBR shelf when I read the synopsis and something about it convinced me to give the book a try.

When I opened the book, the multiple-page table of contents and the over 500-page count on the kobo was a little intimidating. So I decided, I’ll just read the first few chapters and I’ll give up on the book and return it.

Instead, I read through Part 1 and met Nora, who in an attempt to escape the grief of losing a brother, uses her latin skills to get a scholarship to a fancy school. At school, she meets Chris, who knew her brother and became her best friend, in the process gaining another best friend in Adrianne, Chris’s girlfriend. We experience happiness as Nora falls in love with Max, the other student in a translation project and finally stops feeling like a third wheel.

And then, everything ends.

Chris is found murdered, Adrianne in a catatonic state, and Max is missing. This is when the story swallowed me, or to be more accurate, when I stopped being able to put the book down. I flew through part 2 of the book: when Nora and Adrianne fly to Prague to find Max; as a mysterious cousin of Chris named Eli tags along; and as the four of them start looking for the Lumen Dei, a machine that’s said to hold incredible power.

All along the way, letters from the past accompany us. Nora was initially tasked to translate the letters of Elizabeth Weston instead of working on decoding the Voynich manuscript and she continues to translate these throughout the book. I loved that we had Elizabeth’s voice accompanying us on this journey, and it dropped enough clues that it propelled the plot forward.

Speaking of clues and plots, the book is FULL of them. It’s not just the mysterious machine, there are cyphers, lots of languages to translate, and of course, the Voynich manuscript that started the whole thing. If you’re into puzzles and mysteries, you’ll probably really enjoy this aspect of the book.

For me, I really loved Nora. The book is told from her point of view and her voice is so likeable. Nora has been made a cynic by grief and parents that never recovered from grief, and one thing that endeared her to me was how she took one of Elizabeth’s letters because she felt that it was private. Her ability to empathise across time and space, even if she tried to be cynical about it, was what made me like her and root for her.

Long story short, I LOVED this book! The length intimidated me at first but I loved everything about it – from Nora, our protagonist and narrator, to Elizabeth’s letters, and of course, the mystery behind the Lumen Dei. I checked Goodreads and it’s apparently pretty controversial, but personally, it’s my cup of tea.

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