“Dina’s Lost Tribe”
Author: Brigitte Goldstein
I found “Dina’s Lost Tribe” by author Brigitte Goldstein to be an excellent read. Goldstein writes with an impeccable style and her fictional novel is both captivating and enthralling. Goldstein seamlessly weaves together historical fact with well thought out and plausible fiction and truthfully, the end result is a superb story.
The premise of “Dina’s Lost Tribe” is this: Professor Henner Marcus receives a letter with an urgent request for help from his niece Nina who disappeared without a trace five years earlier. Due to the letter’s tone, Henner is fearful for his niece’s safety. He puts his personal and academic affairs in order and immediately sets out to find her. Following the letter’s postmark, as well as Nina’s covert ramblings, Henner winds up almost five thousand miles away from his Chicago home in a small town located in France close to the Pyrenees Mountains. Once settled in France, Henner follows Nina’s instructions to the letter and impatiently waits for her to find him. While he isn’t happy with Nina’s cloak and dagger requests; he is concerned for her safety and will do nothing to jeopardize it.
Nina, a historian of some repute, has searched all her life for the city of her birth; the city of Valladine. Unable to locate this town on any map, and having no concrete evidence that Valladine even exists, Nina finds herself compelled to explore the Pyrenees Mountains in an attempt to satisfy the insatiable hunger and curiosity that this name stirs up inside her.
Rather than give too much of the plot away I will just end by saying there are two separate stories to be found within the pages of “Dina’s Lost Tribe.” Even though these lives are set centuries apart; Nina’s life in the present seems, at times, to mirror a life that happened seven hundred years ago.
In closing, “Dina’s Lost Tribe” was a riveting read. Both past and present stories were written with skill and a seemingly immense knowledge of history, religious history, religious rites and geography. “Dina’s Lost Tribe” definitely merits a five-star rating and I would say it’s a “must read” for anyone who enjoys fiction, historical fiction or simply being able to sit down and read a “good” book.