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The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

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The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is a thrilling mystery that follows a professor of symbology at Harvard University named Robert Langdon. While traversing the roads of Paris, Robert and his companions stumble across mysteries and codes to crack. To add to the mayhem, they’ve got the French Central Directorate of the Judicial Police and later on, the British police to worry about.

Jacques Sauniere, renowned curator of Le Musée du Louvre in Paris, has been murdered by a Catholic monk named Silas, and the Direction Cnetrale de la Police Judiciaire (France’s detective and security service) has discovered something highly unusual about his body. There is a symbol written across his chest and his body is positioned in a peculiar manner which mimics Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. They also find that Sauniere has left a cryptic message on the museum floor around him.

Robert Langdon, who is in France on business, is called in by Bezu Fache, a DCPJ captain, on the pretense of helping to interpret the strange symbols and aspects of the crime scene. Langdon explains to Fache that the pentacle written on Sauniere’s chest must be an allusion to goddess worship, as Sauniere was well-versed in this subject. Shortly after, Langdon is made aware that he is Fache’s prime suspect for the case. Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer, is the one who secretly tells him this, and helps him to escape the Louvre. It turns out that Sophie has her own motivations and, with the help of Langdon, begins decoding the message the curator left.

This book has been on my reading list for a while now, and I’m so glad I finally came about to reading it. I found it very fascinating as much of it pertained to actual religious groups like the Priori of Sion and Opus Dei. I don’t really know much about groups like these, so it was interesting to hear about them and their beliefs. I also really enjoyed the codes and how they were broken. Throughout the book, Langdon explains certain meanings behind symbols, and I found that particularly intriguing. Much of the book focuses on goddess worship and feminine versus masculine roles. Today, this is a very sensitive subject, but it’s interesting to see how male and female roles have evolved throughout history.

This book is full of twists and turns, and is definitely something I would consider re-reading. The artwork and religious groups discussed in this book are accurate, so I actually ended up going back and looking at some of the paintings that were brought up. I was surprised to notice things that hadn’t previously come to my attention.

I would definitely recommend this book–it’s an absolutely riveting read.

-Elina T.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is available for checkout from the Mission Viejo Library. It is also available for download from Overdrive. 

Book Review: The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

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davinci_codeA book that became highly popular years ago, this is a title that many have heard of, but one that few teens from this generation have actually read.

The overall verdict: this is a book that either you will either fall in love with, or that you will hate. It’s rare to find an opinion in reviews that begs to differ.

In my opinion, it was a fast-paced page turner that kept me engaged and relatively entertained during the span of time that I was reading it, but there were still many holes that left me unsatisfied with the book as a whole with its completion.

The basic plot traces the story, both in a modern fictional account and in a “historical” context, of the search of the true holy grail-not only a treasure of time and religious history, but also one of deeper metaphorical symbolism. To provide a more in depth synopsis: a murder within the Louvre in tangent with clues hidden within the works of the great master Leonardo DaVinci (along with many other renowned thinkers and artists) leads to the discovery of a religious enigma hidden by a secret society for thousands of years, a secret that could cause catastrophic change in the base of worldwide religion.

Sounds a bit overdramatic with a dose of being formulaic, doesn’t it?

Brown weaves a fast-paced and entertaining read that leaves you with cliffhangers at every chapter’s conclusion, leaving you flipping the pages till the end. Read as a shallow summertime read is a good investment, however reading too deeply into the “historical facts” may prove dangerous. Taken as pure fiction many of the “historical facts” serve as fascinating concepts for future introspection on secrets societies, treasure, and religion as a whole-taken as fact; however, many prove to be a stretch. Brown treads a thin line in his historical accuracy, writing a story of fiction, but stating many of the facts as the complete truth when transferred over to our world. The main warning: read with a grain of salt.

The plot also leaves you with too many twists to count- one of the most entertaining aspects for me. One moment an ally seems like a foe, the next it is revealed who in fact the true enemy is, and the moment directly after it turns out that one of the main antagonists was actually good all along! (You get the point.) It serves to be highly entertaining, but by the third plot deception it leaves you wondering how much of a formula Brown had at his disposal, and if he really did intend to be so repetitive.

Another thing that particularly struck me was the fact that many of the plot occurrences seemed just too perfect to conspire in real life. Many aspects of the novel proved to be highly unrealistic, a romance where one would never take place in real life, the fact that one of the main emulated ideas in the story is that of a scared and empowered feminine-yet the main (and only) female protagonist is, although being portrayed as smart and beautiful, is forced to act powerless for large stretched in the plot, and that somehow the protagonists always end up where they were supposed to with the answer they needed in the end.

Overall, the writing isn’t terrible-it is just a story that one must read with the intent of entertainment, not fact.

-Sophia U., 12th grade