Book review: A Discovery of Witches

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was quite excited about reading this book as I had heard good things about it. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book and thought it was extremely well written and had the feel of a slow burning literary novel. I was excited to keep picking it up and loved the old fashioned romance that was blossoming between the two main characters.

However, it didn’t carry on. After a poorly executed and gratuitous sex scene just after the half way mark it went downhill. I really didn’t like it after this point as it felt forced and as if it was trying too hard. I also thought that some of the choices that were made by the author were a little senseless. Some authors can carry off a quickly moving plot with lots of location changes, but I really thought it didn’t fit here. It seemed that the author was putting as many threads to the story as possible for the sake of trying to get everything in, but I didn’t feel that they were as well developed or thought through as I would have liked.

This book was 2.5 stars for me as I really liked the first half and I think it could have been extremely well done if edited appropriately and kept the feel of the first half of the book. As a fan of more subtle fantasy, this may have been a tad too much for me, but I won’t be reading any more from this trilogy.


View all my reviews