From the Bookshelf of 2025 Reading Challenge…

A Discovery of Witches (All Souls, #1)

Deborah Harkness

Start date: July 1, 2012

Finish date: July 31, 2012

Discussion leader: Ashley

Why we're reading this: July Group Read
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What Members Thought

Jul 04, 2019 Melissa rated it it was ok

This book was sooo disappointing. I admit that I picked it up because I saw that Matthew Goode was in the TV series, but I also did so because it seemed to have good reviews on Goodreads.

The Anecdotes of science and history were well-researched and the only interesting part of the story. There was very little happening in this story, and especially for a 500 page novel. There wasn’t much of a mystery, and the story Simply jumped from place to place without much intrigue or conflict.

As far as a This book was sooo disappointing. I admit that I picked it up because I saw that Matthew Goode was in the TV series, but I also did so because it seemed to have good reviews on Goodreads.

The Anecdotes of science and history were well-researched and the only interesting part of the story. There was very little happening in this story, and especially for a 500 page novel. There wasn’t much of a mystery, and the story Simply jumped from place to place without much intrigue or conflict.

As far as a romance, this book falls flat. Matthew talks to Diana as if she were a child. He forbids her from doing things and often says, “understood?” Most times, she thinks of doing one thing, but he forbids it, and she just goes along with it, even though the author has clearly created an intelligent, well-educated woman who previously prided herself on her independence. At first, she proves to be an adaptive woman who can fend for herself, but all that goes out the window when the debonair vampire convinces her that only HE can protect, even though he was stalking her and she was extremely leery of him. The strong heroine falls in love and immediately drops any semblance of independence and is completely dependent on her new vampire “husband” who orders to sleep frequently...she’s literally sleeping through most of 2nd half of the book.

The romantic situation between Diana and Matthew was downright cringeworthy filled with awkward banter and even more awkward physical encounters. I only had less than a hundred pages to go when I got to the weird exchange of Matthew presenting Diana with birth control pills followed by an instruction of when to take them, or I would have stopped reading. (Similar situation occurs in Fifty Shades...what is with these weird scenes?)

The vampire was akin to Christian Grey minus the BDSM, and Diana was akin to Anastasia, but with intelligence. Both stories exhaust the demanding, controlling, borderline abusive...but rich and sexy male archetype and the distressed submissive female. A Discovery of Witches was a long, drawn out Fifty Shades minus the sex, but with science and history added. 👎🏼 ...more

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