A Discovery of Witches

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been seeing “The Book of Life” everywhere the last few months. I first saw it around the time the movie by the same name came out, so I initially wondered if the two were related. Turns out they’re not. Not even a little (the movie was a lot of fun though. I definitely recommend it). But people were reading this book everywhere I looked (at Starbucks, on Goodreads, etc.), and The Book Table had it prominently displayed every time I passed by, which got me wondering what all the fuss was about. I figured out it was actually the last book in a trilogy by Deborah Harkness, got the title for the first book in the trilogy, and ordered it from the library (where it had a mere 80 people waiting to read it).

It took me a long time to get into this book. It’s almost six hundred pages long and I was bored for about the first third. The main character, Diana, is a witch who is determined not to use her magic. Her parents were brutally murdered when she was seven and she overheard a comment that made her think their powerful magic was to blame. She’s also a descendant of Bridget Bishop, one of the women hanged as a witch in the Salem witch trials, so fear of humans finding out who they really are is an ingrained part of her family history. Because of this fear, Diana has spent her entire life trying to avoid magic. Of course that’s easier said than done (come on, if you could do all your chores with a wave of your hand, would you be able to resist?)

I found Diana to be pretty boring, but then she meets Matthew: a vampire who is approximately fifteen hundred years old, and he is much more interesting than Diana. Most of the book is told in first person from Diana’s POV, but a few chapters deviate and show scenes when Diana isn’t around. The first chapter that showed Matthew without Diana was when I finally started to get invested in the book. I wanted to find out more about him and his background.

Once the book got going, I had a hard time putting it down. Harkness didn’t disappoint when it came to Matthew’s background, and I found Diana to be much more interesting when she was with Matthew. They make a fascinating couple, and as soon as I was finished with this book, I promptly ordered the sequel from the library.

Despite the fact the book started off slow, there is a reason for all of it. Everything that happens later in the book relates back to things that happened at the very beginning. Harkness really did start this story at its beginning: no earlier and no later. The book is remarkably well-structured, and I have no complaints except for the explanation for Diana avoiding magic.

Diana thought it was a decision not to use magic, but it turns out her parents spellbound her shortly before they were killed. Once she and her friends discover this, they focus their efforts on figuring out how she can get around the spellbinding. She can’t do it consciously. She has to really really want it, so they work on finding ways around the spellbinding. But, if that’s the case, how was she able to whisper a simple spell to call a book from a high shelf into her hands at the beginning of the story? It wasn’t something she desperately needed or wanted, it was just convenient, and I think that contradicts everything we learn later about how her magic has been bound up beyond her use.

Maybe I’m just missing something from that part of the story, but in any case I’m super excited to read the next book, in which Diana and Matthew time travel back to Elizabethan England. If I could go back to any time in history, it would probably be Tudor England. No, it wasn’t easy or comfortable, but it was a fascinating time period!