For a book that seemed to be received so positively initially, around the time of release, it seems like all I’ve read lately are reviews that are disappointed by how boring it is and confused by why it was so well-liked. You might say my expectations were pretty low. So I had to laugh as I realized I was enjoying it.
A Discovery of Witches is EXCESSIVELY academic. Not just in the subject matter, which obviously is, but in the whole tone and writing approach. I recognize every paper I’ve ever written, read, or reviewed in it. The story proceeds in methodical detail, and every piece of information is thoroughly explained, as if anticipating reviewer comments criticizing it for reaching conclusions without showing its work. It’s undeniably stuffy, especially for a fantasy/romance novel with witches and vampires. But I guess after voluntarily putting myself through the wringer of graduate and postdoc study, “stuffy” is the song of my people. None of the “boring” stuff bothered me, even as I recognized that the focus on minutiae throughout was over the top.
However, even though I was obviously more permissive of some of this book’s idiosyncrasies than others, I was still let down by a fairly major part of it: the romance. Diana and Matthew make a lot of sacrifices and invite a considerable amount of danger into their lives because they have supposedly fallen in love with each other, and in the way of fictional preternatural creatures, that love is extra deep and everlasting and passionate and unbreakable. The problem is, outside of declaring it dramatically to each other, I didn’t really see or believe it. I found Matthew to be a rather generic and conventional archetype of romantic vampire: he’s old, with a checkered (bloody) history, he’s unnaturally attractive, and he’s devoted to protecting the “safety” of his human lover past the boundary of good sense and well into the territory of not respecting her autonomy. Such traits are par for the course for the alpha heroes of the romance and fantasy world, but I tire of reading them, even dressed up as an understated academic researcher.
But if I learn to stop worrying and love the romance, the rest of the story still works for me. Okay, these two are a supernatural bonded pair. Fine. They actually make a pretty decent team when it comes to investigative research and strategy, and they need to do quite a bit of it to get themselves out of the mess that was inadvertently created when Diana withdrew an enchanted and presumed missing manuscript from the library as part of her normal study. Unbeknownst to her, all kinds of magical beasties have been trying to get their hands on that document for centuries, and she was able to locate it without even trying. That makes Diana, who was not a practicing witch but came from a long and prestigious line of witches, a person of interest among the supernatural set. Teaming up with Matthew only amplified the attention on her and them because generally speaking, witches and vampires DO NOT hang out, so nobody was comfortable with the two of them breaking with tradition. I wouldn’t call the book suspenseful, because the slow pacing made that kind of tension somewhat impossible, but there is nonetheless still an impressive set of dangers that present themselves throughout the book, and a lot of unanswered questions. I was entertained. I’m even going to read the sequel!
Oh, good! This makes me feel better about eventually reading that secondhand copy I already own but have never gotten around to reading. I love academia and minutiae, too, and often find things intriguing that others think are dull.