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This could have been a great book.

The series has a lot going for it. The author has achieved a perfect level of magic combined with mystery and academia.

Sounds strange doesn’t it?

But this is very much in a similar vein to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The characters explore libraries (yay libraries!) to gain knowledge about the supernatural. The protagonist comes across a very unusual book, a book of magic. The tension is here very early on, the narrative drive is here very on, though it all goes downhill as the story progresses. She drew me with the enchanting mysteries of magic and books:

“The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable. To an ordinary historian, it would have looked no different from hundreds of other manuscripts in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, ancient and worn. But I knew there was something odd about it from the moment I collected it.�



So we have a solid opening, and a solid plot, but the author goes and fucks it all up with a terrible romance plot and her poorly written characters. The protagonist Diana Bishop is a witch coming out of the magic closet; she also likes to go rowing, which the author tells us at every opportunity. She happens to be a Dr in science history. So, theoretically speaking, she’s a smart woman. She quickly falls in love with a mystery man she meets at the library; he is shrouded in darkness and secrecy. It’s quite a romantic encounter; he appears to be something much more than an ordinary guy. She becomes enamoured with him.

Matthew de Clairmont is an ancient vampire who is also a genetic researcher (amongst other things.) We hear lots about his prowess as a vampire, but never actually see it. I don’t really know what he’s capable if. When there was a chance for him to use his abilities, and demonstrate the strength of vampires in this world, he stands back and does nothing. He becomes a piece of furniture and just watches the action. Diana doesn’t seem to mind though; she sticks with this gaping idiot throughout. She’s not even bothered that he watched her sleep like some creepy sex pest. We later learn that he practices yoga, which just ruins the entire vampire image. How can this guy ever be considered threatening after that? He loses all of the seductive powers of vampirism and enters the realms of weird.

There are some good things about this book. The idea of magic behind a world of fact and academic is great. The protagonist goes on to discover what she is capable of in a tale of magic oozing with possibilities. But, these possibilities are never really fulfilled. It’s all about the romance and her dependency on Matthew. She follows him like a little lost dog, for some reason. I wanted to read about a woman who learns about herself and the world through her own willpower not because of the help of an apparently powerful vampire nerd. This book is quite unique, I’ll give it that. The narrative is not told in entirely simple prose; there are suggestions of academic language, which, I suppose, reflect the nature of investigating the mystery book found at the beginning.

The main success of this book was its ability to keep me reading. Obviously, I had a few problems with it, but I still wanted to know the answers to the mysteries Harkness posed. It kept me in suspense by not revealing what the characters are completely capable of e.g Diana’s powers. I know there is going to be much, much, more. The room for character development and new plots is huge. The next book could go anywhere. And because of that I read it with the hope that the characters would improve and that the mysteries would remain. Without the libraries, mystery and books, this book would have been a complete disaster rather than a partial one.