A Discovery of Witches- Deborah Harkness

Man, this one took me a long time. A beast of a book at almost 600 pages, with all the ravings I’ve read on Amazon, I wasn’t really intimidated by the length at first, but two weeks later I wish it had been shorter.

Not at all a bad book, I enjoyed A Discovery of Witches overall. It tells a different kind of story about vampires, witches, and daemons coexisting in a world with humans, some of whom know about their existence, and others who don’t. The main character is a witch named Diana, a historian who inadvertently calls copious amounts of unwanted attention from all magical creatures upon herself by retrieving a long lost (and very powerfully protected) manuscript about the creation of these beings. From there, things go a little crazy.

Diana meets Matthew, a vampire, near the beginning of the book after calling this manuscript, and in what has become a cliché of fantasy books lately, falls in love with him. Matthew has a strange life though, and adding Diana into the mix causes all kinds of problems.

One major problem I have with this book is that I was unaware it was the first of a series. Maybe if you know that going in, you won’t have the same problem I did when I finished, which was a growing feeling of anger as less and less of the book is left and nothing has been resolved. I’m ok with the storytelling devices that the book uses, the details that people have complained about on Amazon don’t bother me, but what I’m not ok with is no resolution to the story at all. Basically the author introduces about a million problems for Matthew and Diana and solves exactly none of them. She’s a good writer, and I was obviously invested in the book since I kept with it over the last two weeks, but when I finished it my first reaction was “what the heck was that?” It was like she just wrote for a really long time and never went anywhere with it.

Needless to say, I’ve got some mixed feelings on this one. It’s an interesting idea, I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not really clambering for a sequel right away, and am really a little bit frustrated that in 579 pages the author couldn’t resolve anything. Really?

I’m going to go with a 3 for now. I’m certainly not going to re-read it, but I’m also not ruling out reading a sequel eventually, so obviously I must have enjoyed it a bit. Right now I’m feeling pretty indifferent about it.