Reviews with content warning for Animal death - A Discovery of Witches

Reviews tagging 'Animal death'

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

40 reviews

lenorayoder's review against another edition

mysterious medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters? No

4.0

I really liked this book! It was a bit of an odd reading experience, because once the romance gets going it starts to feel like a different and slightly worse book. I loved the first 15% or so of this book and thought it would be a five star read. At that point it becomes clear that Diana and Matthew's romance is going to progress a lot more quickly than I thought, and we start to run into a lot of romance novel cliches. This would have normally merited a 3 star rating, but I think Harkness' world building manages to make the cliches make enough since that I'll forgive their presence, even if I think the book would be better without them and with a slower relationship build. Diana's absolute denial

and spellbinding

make the different tone of the beginning of the book make sense, but I think it's a shame that the beginning feels so much better than the rest of the book.

I loved all of the world building, and I think it helps the romance and certain plot elements seem less ridiculous. The fact that the relationship we see in this book takes place over

40 days

seems stupid, but Harkness makes it clear that Diana and Matthew are not human, and holding them to human standards is a mistake. These are creatures who can literally experience

love at first sight, as shown by Diana's parents. That's not a dramatization, sometimes it actually happens

. That said, I still think the romance isn't well-written, and is the weakest part of the book by far. Diana could seem like a Mary Sue, but you have to remember that her

mother, Rebecca, seems to have seen her future before even conceiving her. Diana was basically born and raised to create some serious change in this world

. I mean, someone has to do it, right? Of course that's going to be the person an author writes about.

This book was consistently engaging and enjoyable to read. I was constantly theorizing and asking questions. I'm looking forward to getting more answers in the next books, and I know I will because this is clearly a planned out series that's laying groundwork with this first book. I wish the romance felt as polished as the beginning of the book made me think it would be, but I had a fun time and was never bored.

Final thoughts: I love the Bishop house, we stan characters getting privacy! I hope someone kills

Gerbert dead soon

, what the fuck was that with

Juliette and how many people has he done that to

??? I don't get why everyone was alarmed at the idea of

Matt killing Satu. Like she's going around deeply torturing witches and who knows what else? Sometimes when you behave like that people kill you

! Agatha being the only decent

member of the Congregation

we've seen makes me curious to find out if it's always been

corrupt/fucked up

, or if that's something that developed over time. Don't like the whole

bloodline = power

thing even though it's kind of central to the plot. Given the timeline of these books I think it would be very funny if Diana

gets back to the present "quickly" enough that Hamish never sends her letter backing out of the conference,

and the entire series ends with her giving the keynote presentation she started this book being stressed out about. Perfect ending.

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_marycappiello3's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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ievarag's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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fkshg8465's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

If I wasn’t a vegetarian, I think I might like trying to be a vampire. 😂😂😂😂

I couldn’t put this down. In fact, I was so mad that I had to go to sleep at all, and it was already almost 4 am when I finally gave into my slumber. Had no idea it had been made into a TV show until I was well into the book and read it in someone else’s review while making dinner last night. Now I’ve got to figure out how to stream it while waiting for the second book to come off my holds shelf on Libby.

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lakeofstars's review against another edition

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mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

if you take away the extremely toxic romance, then there's a good story set in a Really interesting universe here. i adored the weaving of history, science, and magic, the fact that it focuses on two scholars, and that there's a big underlying mystery that actually requires the expertise of said scholars (a geneticist and a historian) to unwind. but then, all of it is shaped around a stupid, disgusting, unhealthy romance, and that ruins it all for me. matthew, the male lead, is extremely possessive, controlling, and manipulative towards diana, the female lead. he controls her every move, location, and even the people she can interact with. all of this is excused because he is a vampire who “can’t control his instincts” and has lived longer and therefore “knows what is best.” beyond the distastefulness of such a love interest being romanticized, i personally think that the concept of characters “just being born violently possessive and controlling, they can’t help it!” is… weird at best and bioessentialist at worst. i get it, he’s a vampire, they’re not meant to be sweet and cuddly, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when such toxic behaviors are not only excused, but defended within the text. it works in horror stories like carmilla (which was MILD compared to the way matthew treats diana sometimes), not in regular romances where we are expected to take such “boys will be boys”-esque excuses at face value. at least it seems like all vampires in this universe have these instincts, not just the males, which would make things significantly more problematic. but that doesn’t mean i’m ever going to accept that matthew’s abusive treatment of diana is “romantic.” additionally, i didn’t like matthew as a character. even beyond the toxicity, he was not nearly as charming as the author clearly wanted us to believe that he was. the amount of times i audibly scoffed because he was throwing another tantrum (a 1500-year-old man, btw), saying something that was supposed to be suave but felt cringey, or insisting his privacy was more important than diana’s was abysmal.

also- ironically, considering the entire basis of her character is that she was forging her own path- diana had NO agency at any point. whether it was finding out her op magic had been guiding her all along, matthew dictating her every action, or other characters swooping in and saving her any time she is about to have to fend for herself, she doesn't DO anything!! oh, except for have a five-paragraph internal soliloquy about mundane activities like exercising or preparing tea every other page. thankfully, she does investigate a lot of things herself, but believe me when i say you have to trudge through chapters of her doing busywork and either thinking about or being bossed around by matthew before you get to see it. i don’t mind an overpowered MC if they’re written well, which i hoped diana would be, but she ended up being a typical mary sue who, despite being described as incredibly headstrong and independent, constantly bends to the will of and needs to be saved by the big strong male lead. i wish that this book was just about her because before she started dating matthew and everything came crashing down, i found her characterization and gradual acclimation to her new abilities to be compelling.

but all of that aside, this book’s greatest sin is that it was boring. i was BORED reading a book about solving mysteries, about magic, about witches and daemons and vampires, about history, about science, about alchemy- about so many things i normally love. the novel barely focused on what made it interesting to me in the first place. it made what should have been high stakes seem inconsequential, considering the characters barely paid them any mind most of the time. if this author wanted to write a contemporary romance where a witch and a vampire drink wine and do yoga, then she could have written exactly that instead of sidelining the plot. the imbalance between the romance (notice how i didn’t say relationship development? that’s because there was barely any transition between “i trust him i guess” and “i’m in love with him and we are basically married”) and the main story was severe, and while this may not be a problem for someone who enjoys the romance genre more (and who can stomach such a problematic dynamic), it was a major turn off for me. a book can absolutely be primarily a romance without neglecting the rest of the plot, but unfortunately that was not the case here. and suddenly, at around the 80% mark, the author seemed to remember all of the other plot threads she had neglected and rushed to provide answers that should have been built up throughout the middle section of the novel. Love That!

i also am just straight up not a fan of fertility/conception storylines, which this seems to be leading into for the next book. i'll read it because i AM invested, but... i'm scared.

tl;dr: pros- atmosphere, language/prose, worldbuilding (for the first half, at least). cons- pacing, character writing, relationships
- this was originally going to be 2 stars, but i looked at the other books i gave that rating to and this is definitely worse than them. so... here we are.

Content Warnings

infusionofviolets's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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cgward00's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

DNF at 84%

I should've paid more attention to the dozens of content warnings this book has: around 78% the book revealed that the trilogy is actually all about pregnancy and how the three supernatural races are meant to begin interbreeding. Pregnancy is a deal-breaker in books for me. A shame since I otherwise enjoyed the characters and vaguely historio-supernatural vibes even if some of it was a bit one-note at times.

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