Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a literary hack I can recognize my own kind. In the depths of this book I can see my own struggles to create something mirrored almost perfectly, which made me want to love it but I couldn't (and not just because I was peanut butter and jealous). The book's second biggest problem is that "A Discovery of Witches: A Novel" should really be "A Discovery of Witches: A First Draft" because this door-stopper is in desperate need of some editing. The first few chapters are engaging enough (probably what sold the book) but after that the book takes an interesting premise and proceeds to go nowhere in great fits and starts, adding and dropping elements haphazardly without really adding much dimension to the plot or the players. Any tension built up is gradually deflated in endless bouts of faffing around in tedious passages about dinners, rowing or clunky exposition. The languid sensation is not helped when, after six hundred pages, the book doesn't so much end as it drifts off into the next part of the series. The characters are bad and straight off the paranormal romance shelf. Our heroine Diana is a Mary Sue of the first order with the personality of a piece of white bread - we're told she's a strong, independent tenured Yale professor and the most powerful witch in the world, but we're shown a sullen vessel that can't do anything without her man (in spite of having made it to her mid-thirties all on her own). Our Byronic hero Matthew is a thousand-year-old vampire who checks of all the boxes. He's super rich. He's super handsome. He's super smart. He's super broody and mysterious. He's super controlling and always teetering on the edge of abusive (but don't worry their super special love means he won't hurt her). I struggled to find anything about them believable (as far as one can believe things about witches and vampires). There are supporting characters. Villains deserve a special mention, because great villains can help define a series and really elevate it. That cannot be said of the antagonists of A Discovery of Witches. They're pretty much just your standard evil, mustache-twirling cardboard cutouts who don't seem to have any sensible motivation for their actions. The romance is also not good. Deborah Harnkess must have taken lessons in the art of writing romance from George Lucas, because these two have all the chemistry you'd expect between two wooden puppets brought to life. Their dialogue induces eye rolls and while they do get a little frisky more than halfway into the book (after they're 'vampire married' which is as dumb as it sounds) Matthew takes a page from Twilight and doesn't want to have sex because he doesn't want to hurt her (which is insulting to everyone). No, if I wanted to read about awkward finger-banging then I would look back at my Livejournal from High School. Between the lavish descriptions of lunch and the prolix passages on yoga and horesback riding this is more like lifestyle porn for Basic Bitches than it is good literary smut. The biggest sin of A Discovery of Witches is that it thinks it's better than it really is. I came into book being told that it was smart and different but I walked away from it with the exact opposite impression. Harkness likes to drop in a few allusions and references to history she's studied, to books she's read; she lavishes attention on the details of wines and Oxford but they never really feel like a part of the story, they're never woven into the text in an insightful or interesting way, they're just slapped over trite genre as tokens of intellectual merit that the book never earns. Give this book a wide berth unless you want a good hate-read.