Alanna Thornton’s Reviews > The Historian > Status Update

“Skirting those beautiful old walls, I realized suddenly that for the first time I was actually walking in Dracula's footsteps. Until then, I had been following his trail through a maze of documents, but now I stood on ground that his feet — in what sort of shoes? Leather boots, with a cruel spur buckled to them? — had probably trodden.”

A third story within a story!! This book is like Russian nesting dolls haha

Enjoying the father’s story a lot more than the daughter’s right now

Did you, by any chance, find an old book with a dragon in the center? I said.
"He eyed me almost wildly, and the color drained from his healthy face. "Yes, he said. 'I found a book? His hands gripped the edge of the table. Who are you?'
"I found one, too?'

Woah and IH OH

“I have sometimes used Aunt Éva to fill the shoes of characters in books, or figures in history; for example, she stepped in automatically when I encountered Madame Merle, the personable schemer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady.”

Yikes that’s not a compliment lol

Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase from the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind.

“But" — he sighed — "the line between literature and history is often a wobbling one, and I am not an historian.”

"Oh, I know", he said grimly. "I know the look of that face. It is the expression of the undead. There is no other face like that. I have seen it before."