A favorite trope of mine is the sprawling geneological novel, painting a picture of a culture and its transformation over time through the story of a particular family throughout several generations - it is a trope I don’t have many examples of, possibly just One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pachinko, but I think it is a wonderful style of art. The Books of Jacob is not that. But it does come close? Maybe it is a sprawling geneological novel on its side, painting the picture of dozens of characters in a pseudo-familial structure at the intersection of many cultural forces over a very short amount of time. It is an intriguing story of a cult, a culture, a people, a place and time of which I know little, way too many names and everyone has multiple of them.