Interred With Their Bones

Jackie ♦ May 14, 2009 ♦ 2 Comments

My father-in-law always has a book or two for me when I visit their house, like we did for Mother’s Day– he likes historical biographies, historical fiction, and historical thrillers (noticing a trend?). This is but one of the many ways in which I lucked out in the in-law lottery, and I hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day yourself. The last few books have featured Adam Smith and the Transcendentalists– not at the same time, though wouldn’t that be quite a thriller?

Anyway, this weekend’s pick was Interred with Their Bones, which is billed as The DaVinci Code, but with Shakespeare and a female protagonist. In many ways, the comparison is inevitable, with a twisting thriller plot that jumps from London to the American Southwest and back and includes encoded messages only a scholarly expert can decode, with the help of a handsome dark stranger. I think Carrell’s novel (her first) is better than Dan Brown’s work though, but I don’t know that it will be the blockbuster his usually are.

Carrell is a respected and credentialed scholar far beyond many first-time authors– she thanks Marjorie Garber in her acknowledgments, who is a legendary modern scholar of Shakespeare, and Carrell’s erudition on the subject is evident on almost every page of Bones. Her writing is not as dense as you might expect from a scholar of her caliber, which is another point in her favor, but I’m not sure she does as well as Brown does with teaching the reader about the subject in the midst of all the thrills and chills. I think you could fairly argue that she has a much harder job though– I’m an English teacher, and I still have to prepare myself to enter Shakespearean thickets, even though I know by now there are treasures within. I learned a fair amount of Shakespeare myself as the novel tackles the eternal question of who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays as the protagonists attempt to find a legendary lost manuscript.

If that description intrigues you, you’d probably enjoy the book– I think it would be a better plane book than a beach book, if that makes sense, and could be an excellent sunporch read or hammock book. If you’re a Shakespeare buff, I bet you’ll enjoy it– I definitely did.