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A Discovery of Fun Stuff
Jan. 27th, 2012 10:22 pmBefore I review this next book, I'd like to sing you all a song!
*clears throat, so as to give you time to run for the hills*
Vampires and witches and magic and prophecies
Really old French stuff and university libraries
Trivia, time-travel, and nerdy heroines
These are a few of my favorite things!
What's that you said? "NO MORE BLOODY SINGING!"? Fair enough.
This week, I read Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches. (Specifically, I read it on my shiny new Kindle after downloading it while waiting in line for the T. YOU GUYS WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE IT IS AWESOME.)
A Discovery of Witches has all of my favorite things. Like, all of them, and then some. What is possibly most impressive is that it is both a vampire novel and a novel that makes me want to live in it just for the food, and while over 90% of my favorite fiction books fall into one or the other of these categories, very few bother with both.
Our intrepid heroine in this book is Diana Bishop, of the illustrious line of Bishop witches, which includes Bridget Bishop who was killed in the Salem Witch Trials. In traditional intrepid heroine fashion, Diana's parents are dead, and much of the plot is very much intertwined with their terrible murder in Nigeria many years ago. Because their terrible murder appears to be related to people finding out they were witches, Diana tries to not use magic, which you know is going to end up not working or there would be no story. She also had terrible trouble actually mastering any spells when younger, which, if you are me, is basically a way of spoilering that she is going to turn out to be the most special super powerful witch ever, but it is done really well so it's okay. Because she is trying to be not magical, Diana becomes a historian, and specifically a historian of science (because science is Opposite of magic), and specializes in... alchemy! And then I go "Ahahahahahahahahahaha seriously?!" but (a) so does every other character and (b) it is sort of explained.
Our male love interest is a vampire! Therefore, I am sure you will be very surprised to hear the following: he is smart, rich, handsome, tortured about his history of killing people, and kind of a dick, where by "kind of a dick" I mean (a) possessive, (b) has anger management issues and (c) has "old-fashioned" ideas about women, because when vampires live for thousands of years and rack up dozens of degrees and read hundreds of books, they do fine arts and STEM stuff only and completely skip over all advances in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, thereby giving an opportunity for the sort of awkward feminism-lite scenes that I never want to read another one of again.
*ahem* Sorry. Apart from the unforgivable sin of giving rise to another incarnation of The Endless Fuckin' Door-Opening Debate, our vampire dude is pretty awesome. Like, he is about as much more awesome than Vampire Bill as Vampire Bill is more awesome than Edward Cullen. His name is Matthew Clairmont, and he is a professor of like fourteen different things related to molecular biology and genetics at Oxford, and he is from sixth century France. He is also about seven feet tall, because in this bit of magical world-building, people get taller when they turn into vampires. (I think this may actually be a version of the vampire myth I have never heard before.) He does yoga, sometimes hilariously. As the book progresses, we learn lots of other seemingly random shit about Matthew that actually turns out to be very important to the plot.
The plot in question is basically about the evolution of the three humanoid magic species (witches, vampires, and daemons), and a power struggle between the current governing body that mandates strict separation between the three species and various creatures who are running afoul of the segregation laws, most notably Matthew and Diana's romance, but also a bunch of stuff including a daemon whose parents are witches and who is pregnant with another witch, some sort of DNA stuff about Diana's parents and the Bishop family in general, daemons getting inducted into a vampire brotherhood that is sort of like the Knights Templar, and some other stuff that I can't sum up in a sensible way. A lot of it involves an ancient alchemical manuscript that has been bewitched and supposedly contains a bunch of secrets about vampires and witches and daemons. (This book reminded me of The Historian in a lot of places; if you liked that, you will probably like this one.)
I think I got a lot more hilarity out of this book than was intended, partly due to my over-familiarity with vampire and fantasy tropes, and partly due to my hoard of totally useless trivia, a surprising amount of which actually shows up in this book, including stuff about obsolete dialects of French and herbal contraceptives. (No, I don't know why I know my herbal contraceptives either. But if I ever need them, I now have an entire tea recipe!) I don't want to spoil why a vampire romance ends up involving herbal contraceptives, but I promise that it is not nearly as bad as Twilight, namely in that it does not involve any mutant half-vampire fetii, at least not yet.
My main criticism of this book is that there are some points in the middle where Ms. Harkness is totally having way too much fun with the sumptuous life she's created for her vampires (and showing off her mad research skills in finding bawdy Occitan song lyrics*), and things slow down into blatant wish-fulfillment territory, so you either have to switch reading modes from "reading a story" to "daydreaming, with textual help" and back, or else its kind of boring and then when Diana gets kidnapped by a crazy Finnish witch and has the ever-loving shit tortured out of her it's like "OH THANK GODDESS."
Despite my complete incapability of reading a vampire story without poking ten kinds of fun at it, I will definitely be seeing the movie version when it gets turned into a movie (it's getting turned into a movie), and I will also be buying the second book when it gets released this summer. The story is going to be a trilogy, where by "trilogy" we basically mean "a three-volume novel," which appears to have pissed off some Amazon reviewers but is completely OK by me.
*Dear Ms. Harkness, DO YOU HAVE MP3S CAN YOU SEND THEM TO ME PLEASE I LOVE BAWDY OLD SONGS
*clears throat, so as to give you time to run for the hills*
Vampires and witches and magic and prophecies
Really old French stuff and university libraries
Trivia, time-travel, and nerdy heroines
These are a few of my favorite things!
What's that you said? "NO MORE BLOODY SINGING!"? Fair enough.
This week, I read Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches. (Specifically, I read it on my shiny new Kindle after downloading it while waiting in line for the T. YOU GUYS WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE IT IS AWESOME.)
A Discovery of Witches has all of my favorite things. Like, all of them, and then some. What is possibly most impressive is that it is both a vampire novel and a novel that makes me want to live in it just for the food, and while over 90% of my favorite fiction books fall into one or the other of these categories, very few bother with both.
Our intrepid heroine in this book is Diana Bishop, of the illustrious line of Bishop witches, which includes Bridget Bishop who was killed in the Salem Witch Trials. In traditional intrepid heroine fashion, Diana's parents are dead, and much of the plot is very much intertwined with their terrible murder in Nigeria many years ago. Because their terrible murder appears to be related to people finding out they were witches, Diana tries to not use magic, which you know is going to end up not working or there would be no story. She also had terrible trouble actually mastering any spells when younger, which, if you are me, is basically a way of spoilering that she is going to turn out to be the most special super powerful witch ever, but it is done really well so it's okay. Because she is trying to be not magical, Diana becomes a historian, and specifically a historian of science (because science is Opposite of magic), and specializes in... alchemy! And then I go "Ahahahahahahahahahaha seriously?!" but (a) so does every other character and (b) it is sort of explained.
Our male love interest is a vampire! Therefore, I am sure you will be very surprised to hear the following: he is smart, rich, handsome, tortured about his history of killing people, and kind of a dick, where by "kind of a dick" I mean (a) possessive, (b) has anger management issues and (c) has "old-fashioned" ideas about women, because when vampires live for thousands of years and rack up dozens of degrees and read hundreds of books, they do fine arts and STEM stuff only and completely skip over all advances in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, thereby giving an opportunity for the sort of awkward feminism-lite scenes that I never want to read another one of again.
*ahem* Sorry. Apart from the unforgivable sin of giving rise to another incarnation of The Endless Fuckin' Door-Opening Debate, our vampire dude is pretty awesome. Like, he is about as much more awesome than Vampire Bill as Vampire Bill is more awesome than Edward Cullen. His name is Matthew Clairmont, and he is a professor of like fourteen different things related to molecular biology and genetics at Oxford, and he is from sixth century France. He is also about seven feet tall, because in this bit of magical world-building, people get taller when they turn into vampires. (I think this may actually be a version of the vampire myth I have never heard before.) He does yoga, sometimes hilariously. As the book progresses, we learn lots of other seemingly random shit about Matthew that actually turns out to be very important to the plot.
The plot in question is basically about the evolution of the three humanoid magic species (witches, vampires, and daemons), and a power struggle between the current governing body that mandates strict separation between the three species and various creatures who are running afoul of the segregation laws, most notably Matthew and Diana's romance, but also a bunch of stuff including a daemon whose parents are witches and who is pregnant with another witch, some sort of DNA stuff about Diana's parents and the Bishop family in general, daemons getting inducted into a vampire brotherhood that is sort of like the Knights Templar, and some other stuff that I can't sum up in a sensible way. A lot of it involves an ancient alchemical manuscript that has been bewitched and supposedly contains a bunch of secrets about vampires and witches and daemons. (This book reminded me of The Historian in a lot of places; if you liked that, you will probably like this one.)
I think I got a lot more hilarity out of this book than was intended, partly due to my over-familiarity with vampire and fantasy tropes, and partly due to my hoard of totally useless trivia, a surprising amount of which actually shows up in this book, including stuff about obsolete dialects of French and herbal contraceptives. (No, I don't know why I know my herbal contraceptives either. But if I ever need them, I now have an entire tea recipe!) I don't want to spoil why a vampire romance ends up involving herbal contraceptives, but I promise that it is not nearly as bad as Twilight, namely in that it does not involve any mutant half-vampire fetii, at least not yet.
My main criticism of this book is that there are some points in the middle where Ms. Harkness is totally having way too much fun with the sumptuous life she's created for her vampires (and showing off her mad research skills in finding bawdy Occitan song lyrics*), and things slow down into blatant wish-fulfillment territory, so you either have to switch reading modes from "reading a story" to "daydreaming, with textual help" and back, or else its kind of boring and then when Diana gets kidnapped by a crazy Finnish witch and has the ever-loving shit tortured out of her it's like "OH THANK GODDESS."
Despite my complete incapability of reading a vampire story without poking ten kinds of fun at it, I will definitely be seeing the movie version when it gets turned into a movie (it's getting turned into a movie), and I will also be buying the second book when it gets released this summer. The story is going to be a trilogy, where by "trilogy" we basically mean "a three-volume novel," which appears to have pissed off some Amazon reviewers but is completely OK by me.
*Dear Ms. Harkness, DO YOU HAVE MP3S CAN YOU SEND THEM TO ME PLEASE I LOVE BAWDY OLD SONGS