A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness Review

I picked this up at Barnes and Noble in December. It was on the ‘buy one get one half off’ table next to the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It was a great day, as both of those have turned out to be excellent reads! More on Night Circus later… A Discovery of Witches ended up being my book for Christmas Eve this year (being the mom, I get to do almost all the shopping so I get to give myself presents I’m going to like HA!) and it was just about perfect for this time. As in, the week between Christmas and New Years when you don’t want to do anything or use your brain much so you read a fun book. I didn’t note at the time I bought it that it was book ONE of a trilogy, though I should have guessed. I also don’t remember noting that there was a show of this out already, since it is the ‘old cover’ and not an updated show cover. The things I don’t notice while hurriedly shopping the week before Christmas are sometimes astonishing… but that’s also not the topic of this post. To the book!

This story takes place in modern day (well, 2011 when it was published modern) London, France, and upstate New York. A working knowledge of Oxford and a map of the areas might have been helpful to look up in understanding some of the little details, but I feel like I got by okay for having never been to or studied much on these areas. 

In terms of how this fictional world departs from real world, it’s fairly normal except… there are real Witches (as in descended from Bridget Bishop et all from the Salem Witch Trials), Vampires (not Dracula-style, but not Twilight-style either, more human and long lived of course), and also Daemons (who are not magical like Witches, or long-lived, strong, good looking like Vampires but have some aspects of both and usually some form of savantism or other mental acuities). These groups don’t mingle with each other, so as to not attract attention from normal people, since the numbers of normals are so much greater than the numbers of Creatures. 

Enter our characters: Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont. Diana is our POV character for the story. The last of the Bishop witches, she doesn’t really know much about magic or the world of Creatures except that she doesn’t really want to belong to it. She rarely uses the little magic she knows and has instead become a professor of history with her main area of study being Alchemy and alchemical texts from the 16th century. Also, her parents were murdered when she was young and she was raised by her aunt. Diana is at Oxford for the fall studying original manuscripts at the Bodleian library. One evening she’s unable to reach a text high on a shelf and uses a bit of magic to get it down without finding a stool. And she’s observed by Matthew Clairmont. He’s a vampire and also professor at Oxford studying genetics (imagining vampires taking blood samples is… strange for me, but okay why not?) Throughout the story we learn that Matthew was born in the 500’s in France. He had a wife and child and after they died he was suicidal and maybe slipped (or jumped?) from a scaffolding where he worked as a stonemason. He was found and turned just before he died by Ysabeau his Vampire mother and has been working on the family business ever since-through crusades and wars and plagues and meeting every significant historical person pretty much ever. He has originals of all kinds of books you can’t find in even most university special collections. Which is cool but it almost seems like he… knows too many people. But it’s fictional and he’s a vampire so do regular rules apply to him? Not really. 

Anyway, Matthew and a bunch of other Creatures are watching Diana because she found a ‘lost’ alchemical manuscript that describes the origins of Creature species and everyone wants it. Which is pretty creepy, but Matthew and Diana have love at first sight (more or less) and he protects her from the scary bad guys. Of course, once they attack her, and go through her room and such, Matthew decides Oxford isn’t safe and he takes Diana home to Sept-Tours, the ancestral family castle in France where we meet Ysabeau and Marthe who help her learn about vampire life and their history. Because almost as soon as they get together Diana wants Matthew (and his protection) more than she wants to keep researching or other professor things. And the magic Diana has begins to come out in bizarre ways-water from every part of her almost drowning her, hearing people’s thoughts or past conversations… but she has no way to control it. Of course the trouble in Oxford follows Diana to France (since travel is easy for everyone in 2011) and she is abducted and tortured by Witches for secrets about her magic. Matthew saves her of course, though she did free herself from the Oubliette. And they decide staying with Diana’s aunt might be safer and then she can learn witch stuff she should already know. Turns out it’s still as easy for bad guys to find them in NY, and Diana can’t learn the things she needs to from her Aunt Sarah. So she’s going to have to travel to the past… and the objects she needs to be able to do that show up ‘magicaly’ just in time to have her ability to timewalk fully manifest. So book 2 will be their adventures in the past. There are a few action scenes, with some implications for later in the series I think, and the last one was pretty epic for this type of story. But I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’m not going into details. The biggest problem I had with this plot is that it… doesn’t really resolve. The problems that show up in the first half are all still there, without concrete solution, at the end of the book. I’d have loved for something to have been resolved even though the trilogy is going forward.

So, did I like it? Um yes, I totally ate it up. The whole ‘still a better love story than Twilight’ reddit thread deserves this entry. Both parties are old enough to know themselves (more or less) and be consenting adults for a relationship. I liked the idea of Creatures hidden in our world. I liked seeing the blend of ancient and modern in the vampires. The idea of going back in time isn’t super original but it feels organic enough in this story. It’s a really well done book, overall. I didn’t feel like I had to turn off my brain and just hurry through because of how well the author wove it all together (which she should be able to do as a History professor at USC). I really enjoyed the Sept-Tours setting and the Bishop house was really fun with ghosts and all that. Also? Knights. Like for reals, though no swords in use sadly. My biggest eyebrow-raising came when she just abandoned her scholarly work (including email?) for her guy. As someone married to a professor, that’s just not something that happens. But overall it was a fantastically fun and quick read. And it stuck with me after I was done. Definitely recommend the book, but not to teens. See also: bundling in the historical sense. And book 2 has a considerable amount of sex, which I wouldn’t give to kids until after HS.