A Discovery of Witches by Deborah HarknessMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
biz barclay was very right in the summation of this book as "Twilight, with eugenics!" There are several scenes in this book with a direct equivalent within the first Twilight novel, and the overarching plot of this book follows Diana and her vampire love interest through the same relationship beats that Bella and Edward hit through their entire saga. As for the eugenics, essentially every plot point in this book has to do with anti-race-mixing sentiments (most peculiarly from an elder lesbian), race extinction, and characters who wish to enact a genocide on one magical race or another.
Furthermore, an uncomfortable amount of the book is focused on concepts of genetic superiority. For example, Diana Bishop is not the main character because she's an alchemical scholar who happens to fall in love with a vampire. She's the main character because she happens to be descended from two lines of witches (both of which start with actual victims of the Salem witch trials, a subject which is handled with no delicacy), and she happens to have eaten her twin in the womb, and she happened to inherit several genes related to magic that were thought to be extinct. Diana is a brilliantly talented witch through no fault of her own, it's all because of how she was bred.
I do think that this is a fun sort of book for anyone who loves Twilight to read, though I urge other readers to keep their critical thinking hats on through the novel. Diana and Matthew's quick burn romance is all fun and games, but, as with Twilight, there are deeply troubling themes baked into the logic of this plot. So to with the romance itself.
All of that being said, this would have been my entire personality if I had read this in middle school.
View all of my book reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment