Brooks draws you into the book through the character Hanna Heath, a rare-book conservator. She does not "restore" books, she stabilizes them. In her view, the tears, stains, and markings in old books give us valuable information about their history. When Hanna is called to Sarajevo in 1996 to work on the five-hundred-year-old Haggadah, she finds artifacts which lead to minor mysteries: How did an insect wing get crushed between the pages --- a wing from an insect found only in high altitudes? There are wine stains on one page, but when the wine is analyzed it is not kosher wine (and therefore would not have come from a seder service). Where did it come from? Why is this Haggadah so lavishly illustrated when it dates from a time when Jews forbade representational art? Why does its picture of a Jewish seder dinner show an African woman seated among the European family?
We get the answers to these questions in the course of the book. But more important, we get a message: the survival of this remarkable document shows that the "people of the book" --- Jews, Muslims, and Christians --- can respect each other and live peacefully together.
When the SWE CD Book Club (Ann Arbor) discussed the book at our July meeting, we all felt the book's best point was its message. The weakest part was the extensive sub-plot of Hanna's relationship with her snobbish mother. In our opinion, this detracted from the story that Brooks was telling. But this was a minor criticism, and we all recommend the book.
*A Haggadah is the text for the Jewish Passover seder which tells the story of the flight of the Jews from oppression in Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs.