PEOPLE OF THE BOOK gets yet another review, this one in the NYT by Janet Maslin. She isn't enthusiastic. Excerpt:

A Literal Page Turner of a Mystery

By JANET MASLIN
Published: January 7, 2008

“For the librarians,” says the dedication page of Geraldine Brooks’s new novel, “People of the Book.” That’s an understatement. What librarian could resist a novel that has the word book in its title, is centered on an intrepid book conservator, exults in book-preservation exotica (“I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments”) and has a plot about a rare book with a long, fraught and serpentine history?

But the intense bibliographic appeal of “People of the Book” turns out to be a mixed blessing. It lands Ms. Brooks neck-deep in research. It overburdens her tale in ways that make it more admirable than gripping.

Although nobility is one of this work’s most conspicuous attributes, “People of the Book” is also schematic and histrionic, piling serial tales of suffering onto the Sarajevo Haggadah and those who determined its fate. When one character threatens to put the Haggadah in jeopardy, another character warns, “You will be sowing intercommunal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal.”

[...]

Bleah.