Review: A Discovery of Witches

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This book is everything I'd hoped Kostova's The Historian would be, and more.

As an academic, I'm nervous whenever a read a book featuring an academic as a protagonist. I'm sure most people feel the same way whenever they read books that cover a subject they know well. Despite my anxiety, I gave this book a chance in October of 2011, and I'm glad I did that. Deborah Harkness is an academic as well, and her knowledge of the field, as well as her incredible writing, created a book that is both rich and exciting. Having finished the book a second time, I think it's finally time for me to write a review.

Diana Bishop is a witch, one that doesn't use magic. Or, she tries not to, unless absolutely necessary as when the washer nearly flooded her home. But that was an emergency, you understand. She comes from a long line of witches, a line that began with Bridget Bishop in Salem. However, having turned her back on magic, she is a tenured professor at Yale. As the book opens, she's on sabbatical at Oxford, researching very old alchemical texts in preparation for a conference presentation. One of the books she requests from the Bodeleian is far more than it appears, and once she lays hands on it, suddenly seemingly every creature in Oxford is watching her.

There are three groups of creatures: witches, daemons, and vampires. All of them pass for humans and live among them, but each group is quite different. This book that Diana found is very important to all of them, each for different reasons. Some believe it has the answers on how to kill the others. Some believe it presents their origin story. Some want to prevent it from fall into the hands of others.

Shortly after discovering the book, Diana meets the vampire Matthew. He, too, is interested in the book, but his motives become increasingly murky.

This is a fabulous novel. Harkness understands the fever that drives an academic researcher. As I read the book, I, too, wanted to touch the old books that Diana reads. Her obsessions became mine. The novel starts slowly, but the intensity builds steadily. By the end of the book, everything is happening at a seemingly breakneck pace.

I fear this poor review simply cannot do justice to the book; its layers of history and characters are too complicated to lay bare in a short review.

I reread it in order to prepare myself to read the second book. Now I find myself gripped with a fever again--I must know the end of this story! It's not enough to say that I'm excited; I am absorbed.



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