Review: Was this 'love' or 'lust'?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 16, 2014
The idea of this book is truly interesting and, evident by the writing style, the author presented the material in exactly the way he wanted to. You can tell when a writer is trying to force their writing to fit a certain "mold" to present information; the writing here is smooth and transitions well from one area to another. My biggest problem with this book was all of the information dumps. It's very hard for me to say this book was good or bad, because I'm not sure that I was the exact target audience. The right reader will find an interesting story here.I honestly thought I would enjoy this book.  One of my roommates in college was an archaeology major and I tooled around with her more often than not because I found everything so fun and exciting. And I took a lot of religious studies classes over the years.  So a book that combines two things that I find extremely interesting I thought for sure would suck me right in.  I think part of the problem was that I was looking for a story, and what I seemed to get was a lot of theory presented in an academic way. Often times I felt as though I was reading notes from a lecture than a story.The book starts with info dumps and it continues through about 30% of the novel.  Now, if you have no knowledge of any of the subject matter presented, you might find this incredibly interesting. Again, this goes back to being the right reader; obviously I wasn't. I do understand that the characters we deal with in this book are academics, they speak like academics in very specific terms. The interactions between the characters feels artificial and forced.A lot of people were upset with the author's digs to Dan Brown. Personally, I didn't feel like these were meant to be insults, but I can't say for sure that they were hidden forms of praise either.There comes a point where we lose characters and once those characters are gone the book's focus seems to shift. Gone is the mystery, the action, and the adventure and we are left with something completely different.  I felt like I had been ripped off;  I was baited into the book with all those things and suddenly it was yanked away. It wasn't because I felt the loss of the characters because honestly they were rather flat, there wasn't a lot of development. Everyone was one-dimensional. The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good. There's no grey area here. No good guy who has a bad day and uses foul language and does something seemingly very ... not what a good guy should do.  And the bad guys did everything the typical villain would, no moment of conscience, no show of morals or even human emotion at all.  Very flat.I think everyone knows that I love a good romance. Unfortunately, the romance presented here added absolutely nothing to the story, in fact for me it detracted.  It made the main character less likeable in my eyes.  His love was obviously not real, it was more lust than anything else.I am going to stress the fact that I was obviously the wrong audience for this book.  While I did find the idea behind the story very interesting, the way in which it was presented was not appealing to me.  It's obvious that the author did a lot of research in writing this book and he does a good job tying different cultures and time periods together with one central idea.  In the hands of the right reader, this could be a very enjoyable book.  It just wasn't for me.