De-witched
At the end of Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches, the 21st century witch Diana and her 1,500-year-old lover the vampire/ex-Crusader/geneticist Matthew travel back to the year 1590 to seek out the mysterious book that’s caused them so much trouble in 2009. What better way to solve the mystery than to find the book before hostile witches, daemons and vampires get to it?
We were so charmed by A Discovery of Witches that right after we speed-read it we rushed to the bookstore in search of its sequel, Shadow of Night. By chapter one the spell was broken, and by chapter two we had done what Dorothy Parker recommends for certain books: hurl it across the room with great force. How did our fascination end so fast?
A Discovery of Witches had a whimsical nerdiness that distracted us from its main flaws, breathless prose and meandering to the point of randomness. This whimsical nerdiness, expressed in amusing historical detail, long passages about the correct way to prepare tea, and annotations on Darwin’s Origin of Species pertaining to vampires, daemons and witches, is gone from the sequel. It has been replaced with a self-conscious nerdiness that feels defensive, viz. “This isn’t just another tale of vampire lust, it’s an entertainment by a scholar of Elizabethan history and science.” It is crammed with so much exposition, so many digressions, and unnecessary historical cameo appearances that our soul left our body and traveled to the publishing house in 2011 to bludgeon its negligent editor with the 584-page trade paperback. Pass!
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
February 20th, 2013 at 23:26
Hahaha!
Sophomore jinx, middle child / middle anything syndrome?
That’s it! I’m buying The Portable Dorothy Parker instead! Been eyeing the comic-y cover and nice paper for ages.
February 20th, 2013 at 23:42
Good. I’ve been looking for a copy of A Discovery of Witches but none of the Araneta Center bookstores had it. Now I don’t have to head elsewhere to hunt down a copy :D
February 21st, 2013 at 03:56
I’d still read the first one (based on your previous review), and I’ll take it from there if I want to try this.
Didn’t know the character’s name is Diana – wow, that’s definitely a new and creatively unique name to give to a witch. :)
February 21st, 2013 at 13:45
Maybe you could try Matthew Quick’s “Silver Linings Playbook”?
I’m currently reading it, and Pat (the protagonist) reminds me a little of Charlie from “Flowers for Algernon.”
I also watched the movie just recently.
(The first time I saw Jennifer Lawrence appeared in the film, I couldn’t believe it; I felt like a bleeping schoolboy. This may sound cheesy, but the sight of her took my breath away! I had such a huge crush on her I laughed.
I’d probably be pulling her pigtails and flipping her skirt if we were classmates during fifth grade.)
Anyway, I love the book–is what I’m trying to say.
And the movie, too.