EASTER ISLAND

Easter Island, by Jen Vanderbes: I picked this up because a review compared it to Possession and I love A.S. Byatt. It has sort of a similar structure, in that it’s about academics, one half of the story is in the past and the other half is in the present, and there is a mystery about the past to be solved, but it’s slighter and simpler (and, of course, about scientists and anthropologists studying Easter Island, not British literary critics studying poets). The end was a little unsatisfying to me—if anything, I would have liked the book to have been longer and dwelt on a few things more—but I do love reading stories about experts and intellectuals and researchers and long, hard work in the field, lab, or library (I know, that’s nutty, but it always seems so quiet and orderly and yet interesting). In that respect, it was extremely satisfying.