I finally finished the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness! It was fun, even though it didn’t make a lot of sense.
In the final installment of the trilogy, they find the Book of Life and manage to put it together again. That part didn’t surprise me. I was fully expecting the pages to fuse themselves back into the book, and they did. I even liked their little adventure to find the buyer of the third missing page, who turned out to be a daemon named Thomas that Diana already knew. That was fun to watch him and his daemon craziness with his mansion and his little dachshunds.
What I don’t get is how Diana ended up absorbing the Book of Life. If this thing is so special and so full of knowledge, why should it get sucked up into just one person? Isn’t that depriving the rest of the world of that knowledge? Not that Diana is selfish or power hungry. I just don’t see what makes her so special that the Book of Life would choose her as its next host.
I’m all for special main characters, but I think Harkness went a little too far with Diana. A powerful witch named after an ancient goddess I can believe. A witch with many different kinds of power (when most witches only get one), who is also a weaver (can create new spells), is chosen to be an instrument of the goddess (which comes with even more power) also gets to know everything about witches, daemons and vampires? That takes Diana from a powerful witch to practically a deity in her own right, and that’s a bit farther than I’m willing to suspend my disbelief.
Speaking of being the goddess’s instrument, is that really the only price Diana had to pay to save Matthew? Ever since the first book, she’s been so concerned about what the goddess will demand of her, since Diana offered her anything in return for Matthew’s life. Diana (and I) was afraid that would mean the goddess would take the life of someone else close to Diana. Instead, the goddess has chosen Diana’s life: meaning Diana has loads of power that she can only use when the goddess wants her to use it. Fortunately, the goddess appears to be a benign deity and her and Diana’s wishes always seem to be the same.
Really?
What happened to the vengeful deities of old who demand blood sacrifices and your firstborn? What if Diana decides to be just a little bit selfish (since she’s only human after all) and the goddess refuses her power at the last minute? I felt like this part of the story was a pretty big let-down.
That’s OK, because Benjamin made up for it. As I said in my review of the last book, the characters are undoubtedly the best part of this series, and that includes one of the best villains ever. Benjamin is a psychopathic vampire who is scary smart. Can you think of a better villain than that? Because I can’t. He was incredibly evil and manipulative and powerful and I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to do next. I was sure Matthew was going to defeat him, but I also wasn’t surprised when Benjamin captured Matthew. Harkness needed to raise the stakes after all, and Benjamin seemed too smart not to capture Matthew. He just didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he invited Diana to come out and play.
The only thing that really bothered me about this book was the switching between narrators. Most of the trilogy is written in first person point of view from Diana’s perspective, but occasionally it deviates to a limited third person POV from another character’s perspective. For the most part, I was OK with this because first person is extremely limiting and I wanted more scenes with characters like Matthew. This book switched narrators more than a few times though, and it often did it in the middle of a chapter, which confused me and slowed my reading while I tried to get reoriented. Then Matthew told Diana something the reader had already found out in one of the scenes without Diana, which gave the news much less impact than it should have had. Instead of gasping and digesting the information along with Diana, the reader was left going, “Yeah, we know. Can we move on already?”
What about you guys? Read anything good this week? I want to hear all about it.