I was really excited to read this book given it's setting in an important historical place and time and the added piece of characters from diverse religious backgrounds. However, I was really disappointed. In my opinion the book tried to do too much in too few pages. The author seemed to want this to be a sweeping family saga that stretched across generations of the families, but too little time was spent on the various eras of the family history. This left me wanting more detail about each generation and the lives and challenges. This lack of detail also left the characters feeling shallow and underdeveloped. The storyline about the priest who teaches his student how to make love to a woman and encourages the student to observe the priest having sex and allow the priest to watch him as well was just plain disturbing especially given all of the recent sexual abuse scandals involving priests. Finally, I found that the author used too many totally unrealistic events to move the story forward and this turned me off.