Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES is bad. Trainwreck bad, the kind of awful you can't look away from. The narrator is the most flagrant Mary Sue I've run across in a loooooong time. First we find out that she's a tenured professor at Yale at the age of 35. Anyone who knows anything about getting tenure is probably already laughing, but if the process is unfamiliar that's kind of like saying she achieved world peace or found Atlantis. Really, really unlikely. But it's not enough that she's the wunderkind scholar of her generation. No, she's also the greatest witch of her generation. Her mother and father were two of the most powerful witches in their day, and now Mary Sue...er...that is, Diana gets to be as powerful as they were combined. She's also a star athlete, super hot, and, oh yeah, she's got mysterious otherworldly eyes that are like five different colors! Her hair too! A superwoman like Diana ought to be up for some pretty major challenges - it would take something pretty epic to give her a run for her money - which is why it's so very, very strange that NOTHING HAPPENS. I mean, NOTHING. The "plot" (and I use that term verrrrry loosely) gets rolling when Diana calls an enchanted manuscript up from the bowels of the Bodlean Library in Oxford: Ashmole 782. She's trying to deny her magical heritage, so even though she can tell the book is more than it seems she just takes a peek and sends it back. It turns out that supernatural creatures of all sorts have been trying to get their hands on Ashmole 782 for more than a hundred years. They can't call it up, they can't open it - the enchantment is too powerful, it defeats everyone but Diana. So now all these scheming supernatural creatures start scheming after Diana, hoping to use her in order to gain access to this book. So what happens next? Well, let's see. She goes rowing. She takes a run. She goes out to breakfast. She has lunch. She goes to yoga class. I don't mean that she thinks to herself, "I'll go out for a run," but before her run is over, something dramatic happens to further the plot. Oh no. When she goes for a run, she clocks her miles and gets home without incident. Same with the rowing and the yoga and the lunch. So back to the main plot. She calls the book and opens it within the first couple of chapters. She doesn't try to look at it again until about 25% of the way through the book. Does anything dramatic happen between the beginning and the 25% mark? Well...she has a couple of tense conversations, does that count? And she meets her boyfriend. Speaking of the boyfriend, Matthew...well, don't get your hopes up for an exciting romance. Here is a quote, totally in context, where the narrator gushes about how great her relationship with Matthew is: "This was so different from books and movies, where love was made into something tense and difficult." She is NOT KIDDING. There is NO tension. They meet, they're soulmates, the end. Once Matthew takes over, all Diana ever seems to do is sleep and eat. There is one passage that made me laugh out loud. Matthew has been away accomplishing things and he's due home, so Diana is "determined to be waiting when he pulled up." OK! Now we've got some courage and strength on display! She's determined to be waiting! The very next sentence begins, "First I waited in the salon on a sofa by the fire..." and the next couple of pages describe all the other ways she waited. Nothing interrupts her, nothing distracts her. She really spends the afternoon waiting, and we're really expected to read about it. I could go on and on. A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES is like a pinata, in a way, I just want to keep bashing at it. There's just SO MUCH to dislike. Like, imagine all the "spoilers" I'm not spoiling in my review (hint: there aren't many, because NOTHING HAPPENS).