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A review by goodverbsonly
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
1.0
Sydney, HOW could you make me read this? This is a nearly six hundred page book of exposition!
What is so frustrating about this book is how at the...literal center of it, it's nothing more than a vampire romance novel. As a teen in the late 00's I am familiar with the genre. Ah to be 13 in 2009 and walk into a Barnes and Noble to peruse the Paranormal Teen Romance section, picking up exactly zero books. Ah to have a shirt that read in sparkly black letters: TEAM JACOB which of course I wore to school on the day that New Moon came out in theaters. There is no shame in being a vampire romance novel. In fact -- it's FUN, it dominated the market during the time I was in middle school and high school. Deborah Harkness seems to be torn on this though. The middle 300 pages of the book are a slow, vampire romance novel, about Diana and Matthew becoming more and more intertwined and devoted to one another. A forbidden love. The rest of the book seems to be less about progressing the story and more about proving that this ISN'T Twilight. See? See how Matthew is a scientist instead of high school student? See how Diana and Matthew's love is threatened by the convention of the...Volturi - oh no, sorry the Congregation! See how they will FLIP out if Diana and Matthew have a miracle vampire baby! At least that's not like Twilight!
In an effort to set herself apart from what I'm sure was just a thousand identical vampire novels coming out in 2011, the magic of this world is based in science, in genetics, specifically. Genetics with bad implications. Maybe you're high school biology failed you, but when I hear about someone with a third copy of a chromosome I call this a human being, not a daemon, but I guess it's whatever. The fact that I read the section where they detail how the science of the magic works over three months ago, but it still enrages me beyond anything I've read in years, is incredible. It's probably symptomatic of the larger problem with this book; Harkness seems at times desperate to prove that she's smart. Junk science and the history of alchemy and action scenes prove that this isn't a romance novel. Except that "action" scenes last max fifty pages to be immediately followed by Matthew doting on Diana for a hundred pages. Why is this okay in a book like Twilight, but not here? The answer is simple (with the obvious caveat: I haven't read a single twilight novel since I was 14): Twilight is about Bella and Edward. Scenes of intimacy between them are the point of the books. I think they're supposed to be the point here too, but they're getting lost in the insistence of having multiple conflicts.
MULTIPLE CONFLICTS? Yes, multiple conflicts. Of course, multiple conflicts are important in a book, but not...like this:
1) Diana finds a book that has been missing for hundreds of years and potentially contains the secrets of the Origins of Life. The three factions of creatures want to get their hands on it for competing reasons, but the problem is: Diana has already sent the manuscript back and can't seem to retrieve it a second time. What's actually in the manuscript? What secrets does it contain? Does Matthew actually have her best interest at heart or should she have aligned herself with her own people? All these questions SEEM to have been the set up for this book, and SEEM to be answered in book two, but are barely even touched on in this book because immediately the focus shifts to conflict two:
2) Matthew and Diana are in love but a very old Congregation of People thought that for Everyone's Best Interest Vampire-Witch-Daemon couples are out of the question and BANNED. Anyone caught in one of these relationships will be killed (vampires, for what I think are obvious reasons, have a clear advantage here, since they're harder to kill and you really only need to kill ONE part of this couple). Diana is in danger (and perhaps she knows more about her magic and the manuscript than she's letting on?) - By the Way: This is the actual plot of Eclipse.
3) maYABE vAMPIre ChILDreN ArE PosSible??? Sorry - perhaps the interbreeding of species will produce children who are more powerful than any individual kind of us. Does Diana hold the key to these questions - such as the dying out of our species, what's next on the evolutionary tree for all of us? Will this be our salvation or our doom?
All three of these conflicts are interesting, but they're also SO large that they need a book each. My feeling is that all three conflicts will be resolved, in full, in the third and final book in the trilogy. If instead of introducing us to VAMPIRE BABY in book one she had waited until book 2, the question of what is happening in this world and the scope of the conflict Diana finds herself in when she accidentally uncovers the book becomes much more manageable - not only for me, the reader, who keeps forgetting what book I'm reading when I start laughing about vampires driving range rovers (btw, I laugh because Klaus from The Originals also seems to drive a range rover and I think it's genuinely very on brand for vampires to be like...which large luxury vehicle should I purchase?) and about how Matthew won't have sex with Diana for what seems like no reason, but then at the very very end is hinted at because he wants to be married in the eyes of GOD first and performs himself and very small, very intimate Catholic wedding, which honestly almost turned this entire book around for me (Catholic vampires ARE fun and sexy and I stand by that) - but also for Harkness to focus on the details of one major conflict at a time. Like, for example, what's in the book, or what are some current dangers of...mixed marriages. What could potentially happen to Diana if she were to carry a vampire child. Instead, all of these questions are getting answered in one book, badly, vaguely, and in a way that comes across as exposition. At the four hundred page mark, we're STILL getting Matthew's backstory in conversational dialogue...between two characters who both KNOW what happened. Diana is not there. It is for no one's benefit! When we get so much information like this, it makes all of it come off like exposition, and no plot. I would hope that because of the amount of work that was done in book one, book two actually has something happen in it, but I am not hopeFUL as it were.
Anyway - someone really let Miss Diana "I'm Not Like Other Girls" Bishop walk out of the house, all Lonely and Scholarly, cut off from her community and have her TELL us that she is stubborn, but then every time Matthew is like: I am ALPHA so I MUST be in charge!! It's the way of the Vampyre! Diana's reaction is simply: hmm...I shall ask one (1) follow up question and then simply tell my worried aunts that it is FINE because I LOVE him and it's the way VAMPIRES ARE.
The whole thing is sloppy. The characters, the plot, the actual writing, which sometimes seems to forget that Diana is narrating when she is actually still in the room.
Also these vampires aren't interesting. For interesting vampires please see TV's unending parade of nonsense: CW's The Vampire Diaries. These vampires are FUN and SEXY and have BLOODLUST and are reckless and impulsive but they are, above all H U M A N and their humanity is their weakness. And also, tvd is unapologetically romance and so when it's doing dumbass lore stuff you can just be like: oh they're rubbing salt in the wounds about how romantic stelena is? hmm...that's fun for me I guess. It's not ABOUT the plot! It's about the romance. Lean into it, Deborah.
What is so frustrating about this book is how at the...literal center of it, it's nothing more than a vampire romance novel. As a teen in the late 00's I am familiar with the genre. Ah to be 13 in 2009 and walk into a Barnes and Noble to peruse the Paranormal Teen Romance section, picking up exactly zero books. Ah to have a shirt that read in sparkly black letters: TEAM JACOB which of course I wore to school on the day that New Moon came out in theaters. There is no shame in being a vampire romance novel. In fact -- it's FUN, it dominated the market during the time I was in middle school and high school. Deborah Harkness seems to be torn on this though. The middle 300 pages of the book are a slow, vampire romance novel, about Diana and Matthew becoming more and more intertwined and devoted to one another. A forbidden love. The rest of the book seems to be less about progressing the story and more about proving that this ISN'T Twilight. See? See how Matthew is a scientist instead of high school student? See how Diana and Matthew's love is threatened by the convention of the...Volturi - oh no, sorry the Congregation! See how they will FLIP out if Diana and Matthew have a miracle vampire baby! At least that's not like Twilight!
In an effort to set herself apart from what I'm sure was just a thousand identical vampire novels coming out in 2011, the magic of this world is based in science, in genetics, specifically. Genetics with bad implications. Maybe you're high school biology failed you, but when I hear about someone with a third copy of a chromosome I call this a human being, not a daemon, but I guess it's whatever. The fact that I read the section where they detail how the science of the magic works over three months ago, but it still enrages me beyond anything I've read in years, is incredible. It's probably symptomatic of the larger problem with this book; Harkness seems at times desperate to prove that she's smart. Junk science and the history of alchemy and action scenes prove that this isn't a romance novel. Except that "action" scenes last max fifty pages to be immediately followed by Matthew doting on Diana for a hundred pages. Why is this okay in a book like Twilight, but not here? The answer is simple (with the obvious caveat: I haven't read a single twilight novel since I was 14): Twilight is about Bella and Edward. Scenes of intimacy between them are the point of the books. I think they're supposed to be the point here too, but they're getting lost in the insistence of having multiple conflicts.
MULTIPLE CONFLICTS? Yes, multiple conflicts. Of course, multiple conflicts are important in a book, but not...like this:
1) Diana finds a book that has been missing for hundreds of years and potentially contains the secrets of the Origins of Life. The three factions of creatures want to get their hands on it for competing reasons, but the problem is: Diana has already sent the manuscript back and can't seem to retrieve it a second time. What's actually in the manuscript? What secrets does it contain? Does Matthew actually have her best interest at heart or should she have aligned herself with her own people? All these questions SEEM to have been the set up for this book, and SEEM to be answered in book two, but are barely even touched on in this book because immediately the focus shifts to conflict two:
2) Matthew and Diana are in love but a very old Congregation of People thought that for Everyone's Best Interest Vampire-Witch-Daemon couples are out of the question and BANNED. Anyone caught in one of these relationships will be killed (vampires, for what I think are obvious reasons, have a clear advantage here, since they're harder to kill and you really only need to kill ONE part of this couple). Diana is in danger (and perhaps she knows more about her magic and the manuscript than she's letting on?) - By the Way: This is the actual plot of Eclipse.
3) maYABE vAMPIre ChILDreN ArE PosSible??? Sorry - perhaps the interbreeding of species will produce children who are more powerful than any individual kind of us. Does Diana hold the key to these questions - such as the dying out of our species, what's next on the evolutionary tree for all of us? Will this be our salvation or our doom?
All three of these conflicts are interesting, but they're also SO large that they need a book each. My feeling is that all three conflicts will be resolved, in full, in the third and final book in the trilogy. If instead of introducing us to VAMPIRE BABY in book one she had waited until book 2, the question of what is happening in this world and the scope of the conflict Diana finds herself in when she accidentally uncovers the book becomes much more manageable - not only for me, the reader, who keeps forgetting what book I'm reading when I start laughing about vampires driving range rovers (btw, I laugh because Klaus from The Originals also seems to drive a range rover and I think it's genuinely very on brand for vampires to be like...which large luxury vehicle should I purchase?) and about how Matthew won't have sex with Diana for what seems like no reason, but then at the very very end is hinted at because he wants to be married in the eyes of GOD first and performs himself and very small, very intimate Catholic wedding, which honestly almost turned this entire book around for me (Catholic vampires ARE fun and sexy and I stand by that) - but also for Harkness to focus on the details of one major conflict at a time. Like, for example, what's in the book, or what are some current dangers of...mixed marriages. What could potentially happen to Diana if she were to carry a vampire child. Instead, all of these questions are getting answered in one book, badly, vaguely, and in a way that comes across as exposition. At the four hundred page mark, we're STILL getting Matthew's backstory in conversational dialogue...between two characters who both KNOW what happened. Diana is not there. It is for no one's benefit! When we get so much information like this, it makes all of it come off like exposition, and no plot. I would hope that because of the amount of work that was done in book one, book two actually has something happen in it, but I am not hopeFUL as it were.
Anyway - someone really let Miss Diana "I'm Not Like Other Girls" Bishop walk out of the house, all Lonely and Scholarly, cut off from her community and have her TELL us that she is stubborn, but then every time Matthew is like: I am ALPHA so I MUST be in charge!! It's the way of the Vampyre! Diana's reaction is simply: hmm...I shall ask one (1) follow up question and then simply tell my worried aunts that it is FINE because I LOVE him and it's the way VAMPIRES ARE.
The whole thing is sloppy. The characters, the plot, the actual writing, which sometimes seems to forget that Diana is narrating when she is actually still in the room.
Also these vampires aren't interesting. For interesting vampires please see TV's unending parade of nonsense: CW's The Vampire Diaries. These vampires are FUN and SEXY and have BLOODLUST and are reckless and impulsive but they are, above all H U M A N and their humanity is their weakness. And also, tvd is unapologetically romance and so when it's doing dumbass lore stuff you can just be like: oh they're rubbing salt in the wounds about how romantic stelena is? hmm...that's fun for me I guess. It's not ABOUT the plot! It's about the romance. Lean into it, Deborah.