Deborah Harkness

A low-key, gently entertaining read with an uneven pace and very little tension.


"Shadow Of Night" was a slightly disappointing book that I'm hoping will make excellent television (my DVD copy of "A Discovery Of Witches Season 2" arrives next month).

It starts immediately where the cliff-hanger ending of "A Discovery Of Witches" left off and immediately looses all of the tension, urgency and sense of threat that the first book had built up.

Diana and Matthew have walked back in time to the late show more sixteenth century to avoid the wrath of the Congregation, find Ashmole 782 (the magic manuscript on alchemy that caused all the aggravation in the first book) and find a witch to teach Diana how to use her newly unbound powers. To me, this sounded like the premise for a fast-paced quest, full of tension and threat. It turned out to be the basis for a fairly leisurely meander through Elizabethan London (meeting absolutely everyone you've ever heard of from that time), a trip back to Sept-Tours in France to meet Matthew's father and a visit to the court of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in Prague.

The historical details were interesting and well presented. They were also a little overwhelming. I felt, at times, that I was reading a "Lonely Planet* tourist guide to sixteenth-century London and Prague. It was often a fascinating guided tour but one that took attention away from why Diana and Matthew were there. The Congregation, although often invoked as a threat, never became one. The search for the book and for a witch to train Diana lost focus as time was spent watching Diana and Matthew go native.

There were moments of tension, mainly when Diana was having to deal with direct physical threats but these moments took up very little of the twenty-four hours I spent listening to this book.

I liked the scenes in Sept-Tour, which built my picture of Matthew's history and were filled with interesting lore and one of the better scenes of physical threat against Diana.

Diana's interaction with the witches teaching her was well done, both in terms of the ideas on how magic worked and the way in which the women worked together.

I didn't like how passive Diana was until almost that last third of the book. She's a successful female academic who has carved a niche for herself in a male-dominated world. We kept being told that she's an exceptionally talented witch, albeit one whose powers have been hidden until recently. In the last book, she killed a vampire and defied powerful witches. Yet, once she walked back five centuries, she seemed to have lost all agency.

I get that part of that was her adjusting to being in a time where she lacks basic competency while her husband is in familiar territory and being constantly surrounded by absurdly testosterone-charged predatory males but even so, she seemed a bit too soft to survive. She never completely surrenders herself to the will of the men around her but she reacts. she doesn't plan and she doesn't push. She certainly doesn't stay focused on her goals for being in the past. I found this quite frustrating.

In the final part of the book, she finally realises that Matthew's temper and easily-triggered violence are no substitute for a plan. She starts to take charge and to collaborate with other women to achieve her goals.

I also found myself being irritated by the unconscious privilege that Diana exhibits and her Lady Bountiful way of dabbling with rescuing people from poverty and ignorance, only to abandon them when it comes time to leave. I also became increasingly aware of how centuries of brutally used power and wealth combined with a we-know-best approach to all problems have resulted in the De Clairmonts and Matthew in particular, being widely hated. I began to hate them more than a little myself. This made it hard for me to see why, no matter how many terrible things Diana found out about Matthew, she remained so besotted with him.

Overall, I found this to be a low-key, gently entertaining read with an uneven pace and very little tension. show less

I'll write a review of the series as a whole. "What!" you say? How could I have read the series and yet given it a one-star rating? If it was that bad, why didn't I just leave it midway or better still read just the first book. You see, I purchased the whole d***n series and I've hardly ever, in my life, abandoned a book once I've started reading it.

The book is BORING. Even skimming is a task. While the premise of the book had initially fascinated me, the book quickly devolved into an show more unnecessary and elaborate thesis on just about everything. There's fantasy, sure. And historical references galore. Enough to qualify as historical fiction. But then there's just so much discussion about wine. And tea. And architecture. And anything and everything else the author could think of. You have to wade through a hundred pages to get even five pages worth of information that's actually pertinent to the story.

The romance between Matthew and Diana is sappy and thoroughly unexciting. Matthew, despite having lived for innumerable centuries, has no character to speak of. He looms like an overgrown bat (no pun intended!) and has simply no contribution to make throughout. He might as well have been absent. Diana, despite being a qualified historian, comes across as a highly subservient woman simply pandering to Matthew to make him feel needed.There's no depth to any of the characters, for that matter. With all the time the author has spent on describing yoga poses and Indian food, she'd have done better sketching her characters with more to their persona than just the superficial witch/vampire. Ysabeau, Sarah, Marcus, Emily--there was so much to be done with them than just the bare bones we're presented with.

Book 2 was especially bad with the kind of artistic licence the author has taken with the historical characters. So, almost all the most famous people of the time are daemons, witches, or vampires. Anyone who's got anything going for them is bound to be one of these. And so, Shakespeare, poor human that he is, has nothing original to say. All his writing is either derived from Marlowe or inspired by a time-traveler from the future. Really? It seems Ms. Harkness harbors a special dislike for Shakespeare. And the whole rigmarole is just too much. The whole book could have been written in fewer than fifty pages, for all the content that it provides. And the time travel: how could Diana and Matthew's long presence not affect history? And how convenient that the original Matthew of that period just disappears.... where does he disappear to? how will he pick up the threads once he's back... these questions are all unanswered, and we, gullible and naive that we readers are, are expected to swallow this spiel. And why were Jack and Anne introduced? Like Matthew, they seem to have no part to play.

The third book's not as bad as the second one, but the faults are the same. One good thing is that there's a bit less of Matthew, though just a bit. The whole blood rage thing doesn't work. Neither does the weaver bit. Or the Book of Life. I mean what is the book? How was it made? Who made it? None of the questions that have been raised from the beginning have been answered.

Pathetic. Writing the review has made me even angrier. Wish I could ask the author to refund my money and time. DO NOT READ. show less

A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES is bad. Trainwreck bad, the kind of awful you can't look away from. The narrator is the most flagrant Mary Sue I've run across in a loooooong time. First we find out that she's a tenured professor at Yale at the age of 35. Anyone who knows anything about getting tenure is probably already laughing, but if the process is unfamiliar that's kind of like saying she achieved world peace or found Atlantis. Really, really unlikely.

But it's not enough that she's the show more wunderkind scholar of her generation. No, she's also the greatest witch of her generation. Her mother and father were two of the most powerful witches in their day, and now Mary Sue...er...that is, Diana gets to be as powerful as they were combined.

She's also a star athlete, super hot, and, oh yeah, she's got mysterious otherworldly eyes that are like five different colors! Her hair too!

A superwoman like Diana ought to be up for some pretty major challenges - it would take something pretty epic to give her a run for her money - which is why it's so very, very strange that NOTHING HAPPENS. I mean, NOTHING. The "plot" (and I use that term verrrrry loosely) gets rolling when Diana calls an enchanted manuscript up from the bowels of the Bodlean Library in Oxford: Ashmole 782. She's trying to deny her magical heritage, so even though she can tell the book is more than it seems she just takes a peek and sends it back.

It turns out that supernatural creatures of all sorts have been trying to get their hands on Ashmole 782 for more than a hundred years. They can't call it up, they can't open it - the enchantment is too powerful, it defeats everyone but Diana. So now all these scheming supernatural creatures start scheming after Diana, hoping to use her in order to gain access to this book.

So what happens next? Well, let's see. She goes rowing. She takes a run. She goes out to breakfast. She has lunch. She goes to yoga class. I don't mean that she thinks to herself, "I'll go out for a run," but before her run is over, something dramatic happens to further the plot. Oh no. When she goes for a run, she clocks her miles and gets home without incident. Same with the rowing and the yoga and the lunch.

So back to the main plot. She calls the book and opens it within the first couple of chapters. She doesn't try to look at it again until about 25% of the way through the book. Does anything dramatic happen between the beginning and the 25% mark? Well...she has a couple of tense conversations, does that count? And she meets her boyfriend.

Speaking of the boyfriend, Matthew...well, don't get your hopes up for an exciting romance. Here is a quote, totally in context, where the narrator gushes about how great her relationship with Matthew is: "This was so different from books and movies, where love was made into something tense and difficult." She is NOT KIDDING. There is NO tension. They meet, they're soulmates, the end.

Once Matthew takes over, all Diana ever seems to do is sleep and eat. There is one passage that made me laugh out loud. Matthew has been away accomplishing things and he's due home, so Diana is "determined to be waiting when he pulled up." OK! Now we've got some courage and strength on display! She's determined to be waiting! The very next sentence begins, "First I waited in the salon on a sofa by the fire..." and the next couple of pages describe all the other ways she waited. Nothing interrupts her, nothing distracts her. She really spends the afternoon waiting, and we're really expected to read about it.

I could go on and on. A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES is like a pinata, in a way, I just want to keep bashing at it. There's just SO MUCH to dislike. Like, imagine all the "spoilers" I'm not spoiling in my review (hint: there aren't many, because NOTHING HAPPENS). show less

I can see from the reviews that people either love or hate this book. I'll join the former group. I saw the AMC series last year and was intrigued, but a lot of the things didn't make sense—never judge a book by its series—so, of course, I had to read it. When we first meet Dr. Diana Bishop, she is a respected professor of history and alchemy in residence at Oxford, England. Living in the shadow of her parents' violent deaths, Diana never wanted anything to do with magic. She lived her show more life as a scholar, voluntarily suppressing her own powers to bring the lineage of the famous Bishop witches to an end. However, while researching in the Bodleian Library one day, Diana requests an ancient manuscript called Ashmole 782. By doing so, she sets off a series of events that lead her to discover who she really is—one of the most powerful witches in the world. There are suddenly mysterious spells and magic moving beneath the surface of everything. When her own kind threatens Diana, a vampire, the formidable Matthew Clairmont, comes to her aid. Matthew quickly becomes her champion and lover. Diana's stubborn resistance to using and understanding her magic is frustrating at first because who doesn't want to be a powerful witch...right? And she gets beat up a lot, so there's that. Aside from exploding with magic whenever she needs to, she still resists trying to learn how to control it. But with the help of various vampires, witches, and daemons—and the ever-present threat of the congregation—she starts to get some control just as the book ends. I love the way the author has dug into ancient history and combines it with the common question of "why do we exist." I found this story a twisty, page-turner that was captivating and fun. I'm on to the next book in the trilogy. show less