I am currently reading A Discovery of Witches. I thought I’d like to read a chick lit as a break from all the sci fi, and I was curious about all these ‘paranormal’ romance novels. Thus the Witches. And I have to admit it started out great. Academician, Oxford, lots of interesting science and historical shit going down. The scholar-witch opening a book that apparently contains the answer to the origins of witches, vampires and demons, and promptly returning it like any good researcher.
And then the most gigantic brain fart in the form of the main characters’ romance. Everything goes downhill from there. The protagonist devolves from Diana, A Person, into Blank Female Character Who Can’t Do Shit, as the hunky vampire biologist (sounds so much better in theory) devolves into an older version of Edward Cullen. I’m about halfway through, and after the beginning, it more or less became nonsense. I currently have no idea what is going on, but the scientific and historical stuff is keeping me hooked. I like all these ‘beginning of the vampires/witches etc’ theories, like Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. Although I did not particularly enjoy that book.
Robin = awesome. Diana = lame. Also Amon > Matthew because he’s not got his boxers up his arse.
You know, I really expected the hero here to be someone I could fall in love with (keep in mind at one point I was in love with Sherlock Holmes, and later, with Anne of Green Gables’ poetry-loving son, Walter. I suppose based on that, my ideal guy would be some sort of high-as-a-kite literary genius who may or may no be a sociopath), a floppy haired gentleman scientist, who was kind and polite but hid a dark secret without being a complete self-martyrising ass about it.
But no. We have a six foot tall chiseled specimen of a man who is a genius in various areas of biology, and also practices yoga and has fancy wines. He then loses every single characteristic that makes him UNLIKE the usual hypermasculine male lead. All he does is tell Diana, the female lead, what to do, or he does it himself, or he’s protecting her by putting her to sleep or throwing her over his shoulder. Because that’s what you do when you’re with the most superawesomeultrapowered witch in all the entire world. Who turns out to be a useless sap of a woman.
This is how you do vampire.
Anyway, I am still reading this book. I probably won’t bother doing a review of it because it’s just very weird. It’s a cheesy, not-thought-through romance with one-dimensional characters that started out okay, yet it’s got interesting faux-academic aspects that signal the potential of a really good novel. I just don’t understand it. The romance is pointless. It would have been far more interesting if it was a story of Diana finding out the truth and coming to terms with her magical ability by herself, or of Matthew stalking the witch who held the key to understanding the creation of supernatural life, while facing his own personal demons. They can have dalliances at the side to satisfy the more romantic of readers. Dalliances wouldn’t waste as much time as the ‘romance’ in this book does.
More interesting than this book: googling kittens.
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