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Joeanne's Reviews > The Book of Life
The Book of Life (All Souls Trilogy, #3)
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A Discovery of Witches, Book I in the All Soul's Trilogy was fresh and creative, a great story. It had some flaws but all in all it was a well built world, an addition to the fictional realm of witch folklore for adults.
Book II Shadow of Night was historical fiction, a name dropping time travel trip filled to the brim with characters from the Crusader states, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the House of Austria, along with a British monarch and her noblemen. It reeked of elitism, classism, intellectual snobbery and archaic gender roles. It did introduce an essential character called Gallowglass and was an effective way to present backstory on the ancient vampire and witch lineages of the two main characters.
The Book of Life as the end of the trilogy works with some of the characters introduced in Book I and Book II. In a series of books the retelling of a character's origins in the narrative is a distraction as are gratuitous love scenes which can become annoying as this trilogy was of the historic fiction genre and not a young adult romance series. I found the descriptive rape and torture of witches and vampires and the killing of children too graphic for my taste.
The exclusion of persons of color in the first two novels is remedied by the author with the revelation that Diana's best friend Chris introduced in Book I is a "black man from Alabama." This is a fact I seemed to have missed in the first book.
Perhaps Harkness was stretched a bit thin by both plot and characters. She essentially re-mixes and re-plays the attributes and personas. Diana whines and gives in, Matthew broods and runs his fingers through his hair, Sarah warns and dominates. Each character remains frozen, a one dimensional automaton showing little development from the point where they were introduced. The Diana and Matthew of Book III react and communicate just as they did in Book I with too few variations.
One of my favorite characters from Book I was Sophie, the Southern daemon pottery making wife of Nathaniel Wilson, and mother to baby Margaret. Sophie is not a part of this book, yet, there were new additions to the cast and far less interesting minor characters, in my opinion brought back into the fray. I found this disappointing.
Two years is a long time to wait for a final novel that doesn't deliver. The author's solution to the main mystery of Ashmole 782 aka The Book of Life of the title, completely fails to satisfy! Harkness would have been better off with one great book rather than a weak series that essentially turns the story of a powerful witch into pablum.
The audible version read by Jennifer Ikeda was entertaining, however the accents she used over the course of the 3 book series were not 100% consistent from book to book or character to character.
Book II Shadow of Night was historical fiction, a name dropping time travel trip filled to the brim with characters from the Crusader states, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the House of Austria, along with a British monarch and her noblemen. It reeked of elitism, classism, intellectual snobbery and archaic gender roles. It did introduce an essential character called Gallowglass and was an effective way to present backstory on the ancient vampire and witch lineages of the two main characters.
The Book of Life as the end of the trilogy works with some of the characters introduced in Book I and Book II. In a series of books the retelling of a character's origins in the narrative is a distraction as are gratuitous love scenes which can become annoying as this trilogy was of the historic fiction genre and not a young adult romance series. I found the descriptive rape and torture of witches and vampires and the killing of children too graphic for my taste.
The exclusion of persons of color in the first two novels is remedied by the author with the revelation that Diana's best friend Chris introduced in Book I is a "black man from Alabama." This is a fact I seemed to have missed in the first book.
Perhaps Harkness was stretched a bit thin by both plot and characters. She essentially re-mixes and re-plays the attributes and personas. Diana whines and gives in, Matthew broods and runs his fingers through his hair, Sarah warns and dominates. Each character remains frozen, a one dimensional automaton showing little development from the point where they were introduced. The Diana and Matthew of Book III react and communicate just as they did in Book I with too few variations.
One of my favorite characters from Book I was Sophie, the Southern daemon pottery making wife of Nathaniel Wilson, and mother to baby Margaret. Sophie is not a part of this book, yet, there were new additions to the cast and far less interesting minor characters, in my opinion brought back into the fray. I found this disappointing.
Two years is a long time to wait for a final novel that doesn't deliver. The author's solution to the main mystery of Ashmole 782 aka The Book of Life of the title, completely fails to satisfy! Harkness would have been better off with one great book rather than a weak series that essentially turns the story of a powerful witch into pablum.
The audible version read by Jennifer Ikeda was entertaining, however the accents she used over the course of the 3 book series were not 100% consistent from book to book or character to character.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
December 4, 2013
– Shelved as:
to-read
(Hardcover Edition)
December 4, 2013
– Shelved
(Hardcover Edition)
July 16, 2014
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Gilda
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rated it 3 stars
Jul 19, 2014 02:10PM
I agree with your review Joeanne. As you said it is supposed to be a historical fiction but the love scenes made it seem like an adult romance novel. I liked book 1 and 2 better.
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uncanny how you read my mind. Apparently I do not handle disappointment as well as you. After awarding five stars to each of the previous books, I gave this one a single star. Apart from giving birth to twins and christening them, retrieving the Ashmole from the library and standing before the Congregation to defend her principles and findings, nothing in this book seemed necessary to that plot. Everything else seemed like 'padding'.
And why didn't they go and save that witch? They see it and think...oh, I think i'll go to Yale.
I know that Deborah is a big fan of the Outlander series, which is historical fiction that includes many sex scenes if its characters and it is extremely popular. Maybe she was copying that formula but didn't account for her audience to have a different reaction? Just a thought.
FYI, you did miss Chris Roberts' race in the first book, which states that he has "tight black curls and a dark face."
I 100% agree. I loved the first book, struggled through the second, and suffered through the third. She made it too complex and left too many previous characters/minor plot lines unresolved. Such a frustrating end.
This review is exactly the way I felt about the book.
@Laura-I totally picked up on the Outlander themes while reading Book of Life! (I started the Outlander series in between books 2 & 3 of All Souls.) There were several instances where I was struck by the similarities. Happy to read that it wasn't my imagination! :)
Yes, Gallowglass suddenly has an accent in book three!!
I finished this today and came across your review. You have nailed how I feel about this book in your comments. I am so disappointed that I have read so many pages just to learn that there aren't 3 pure species and blood rage can be controlled. I hope someone writes a some fan fiction for this that will give a more satisfactory ending!
Nailed it. It's like you pulled almost every thought I have about this book, straight out of my head, and wrote the review I intended to write.A few exceptions/additions are:
(Spoilers!)
1. I did notice that her BFF was black in the first book, so that didn't surprise me.
2. I will even say that in the first book, and even mostly in the second, the love scenes worked. In this one though? Not so much.
3. The ending was about as anticlimactic as it can get. "It wasn't me! It was HIM!" "No sh*t."
Seriously, I thought everybody already knew that? And obviously, they did. How lame.
4. Also, this is one of those books where none of the good guys die. Bad guys are dropping dead everywhere, littering the pages with the cold corpses of the evil. But somehow none of that nasty reality touches our main cast. Books like that irk me. Phillipe doesn't count, since he was dead way before Diana was even born. But he's as close to death as any of them come. Totally indigestible.
5. That whole thing with the goddess? Eesh. "You will have to give something up to get the book." And what about the coin that Phillip left her, for her boat ride across the Styx? All this hinting that one of them had to die, only to be totally forgotten about later, or resolved through something pathetic like "it was FEAR I had to give up!" Oh, jeez. What a loss. That must be awful for you.
6. And the arrowhead? And the Phillipe? So he was the "justice" of the goddess? Why? Or was it Ysabeau? It's not clear, and it makes little to no sense within the story. And to throw it in at the very end, like, not only is she a walking, ever changing tattoo garden, but now she's the earthly hand of the goddess as well? Why would the goddess need a mortal to mete out her justice anyway?
The point is, after the promise I saw in the first book, and even the things I enjoyed from the second, Book of Life was a MAJOR letdown. :(.
