I will leave it to my book conservator friends to say how accurate the conservation part of the book was - it did seem pretty rooted in reality to me.
I was slightly less enthralled with the modern book conservator parts, which seemed a bit one-note by comparison, although as the book goes along, the character of Hanna Heath becomes a bit more interesting. Throughout these historical chapters we have unexpected twists, strong female characters, and creative ties back to the physical book, which becomes a living symbol of the inter-relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Brooks combines real details of the Haggadah's past together with imagined ones into some rich, well-researched, and exciting historical fiction. In between these standalone chapters, we return to Hanna, her relationship with the chief librarian at the National Museum in Sarajevo, and her globe-crossing research into the history of the book. and these clues are developed into chapters that take us step-by-step back to the book's mysterious creation. As she works with the book, Hanna finds tiny clues to its past - a butterfly wing, a white hair, a wine stain, etc. Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator who travels to Sarajevo in 1996 to document the book as the National Museum prepares to create a special vault honoring the manuscript and its survival immediately after the Bosnian War. This was a wonderful page-turner telling the (mostly) fictional history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a real-life rare illuminated Hebrew book that was made in Spain in the 1300s.
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