The Book of Air and Shadows

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber was a bit too long, boring and at times confusing. It had a good premise, so I was very excited to start reading it, but once I did, the book just dragged on and on, and I couldn’t get to the end fast enough.

There are a slew of characters, but the main ones are Jake Mishkin and Albert Crosetti, who are bounded together by an old manuscript that hints at a long lost Shakespearian play. The discovery of such a play would be worth millions of dollars. Russian gangsters are somehow involved and the race is on to find this play and stay alive at the same time.

Like I said, this book was confusing. Gruber jumps back and forth between the narrative of Mishkin and Crosetti and how each discovers the manuscript and the events that lead them to one another. In between their narratives, Gruber allows the reader to read parts of the manuscript that is in Jacobean English, which is really hard to read. I found myself skimming through those parts especially the first part of the manuscript because it offered nothing but background information on a man named Richard Bracegridle, who later was forced to spy on William Shakespeare.

I didn’t really find any of the characters in this book very likeable. Mishkin is a self-centered, disillusioned asshole that has no regard for anyone but himself. Crosetti is naïve and years to one day be a filmmaker and believes that he is living in a walking script. Neither one had any real qualities that I could empathize with.

I picked up this book because it sounded like it would have a DaVinci Code like feel to it. But The Book of Air and Shadows ran stale compared to The DaVinci Code. It didn’t start getting interesting or picked up its pace until the last 100 pages. The first 300 pages or so was just a jumbled mess and I found myself getting very annoyed with the progress of it. This book was a disappointment and I was expecting much more from it.