Shadow of Night

Shadow of Night
By Deborah Harkness
2012
Viking
584 pages
ISBN: 978-0-670-02348-6
Cincinnati Public Library
Read 8/28/12-9/2/12

I read A Discovery of Witches, the first book in Harkness's All Souls Trilogy (this is the second) quite by accident. No, I did not trip over my own feet and stumble through 500 some odd pages, what I mean is, when I picked up A Discovery of Witches, I was completely unaware that it was the first in a series. As a rule, I try to avoid reading any books in a series until the series is complete. There are several reasons for this: (1) I am very impatient, and I have decided that fiction-reading is not the area though which I want to work on this character flaw. (2) As a fiction reader, I am very forgetful, I tend to forget details of characters and events in novels (even as minor details, phrases, and emotions reactions remain vivid in my mind). Therefore, for me, the best experience of reading a series with any continuity that benefits from a memory for details is to start with volume 1, and read book by book straight through to volume N as if the whole thing is one big narrative. (3) I am very compulsive, and in order to achieve my optimal experience, I have, several times in the past, ended up rereading all of the prior volumes in a series when a new one comes out. (I did this recently when a (surprise!) 8th book in The Dark Tower series came out, and you have a very long blog post on the entirety of The Wheel of Time to look forward to in 2013, sometime after the final volume comes out in January.)

I enjoyed, but didn't love, A Discovery of Witches. It's a good story, with a tight plot that kept me involved despite some flaws (including a not terribly likable female lead, and a not very well developed male lead). I was reading happily along, entertained and excited to know what happened, when I came to a sudden, sinking, realization: there simply weren't enough pages left to wrap up the story. Not even enough to do it badly. I was unhappy. Multiple "damnit"s were uttered. Worst of all, my impression at the end of A Discovery of Witches was that this was going to be exactly the worst kind of series to be in this position. The first book was (1) exciting (I really wanted to know what happened) (2) complicated (no way that I am going to remember all the characters and the details of this world) and (3) just not good enough to want to read again. So I decided to do an experiment. I decided just to read the books as they came out, no rereads, and see how that was. You know, like a normal person.

And reading book 2 about 10 months later... Not so bad. There are definitely details that I have forgotten, so I can see where it might have been better to read straight through, but I had only one or two places where I felt really lost, so it wouldn't have been worth it to read the first book again. I find myself curious about what will happen next, although this volume ended on much less of a cliffhanger, at least for me, than the last one did. (This is good, because the author's website currently has no information, at all, whatsoever, on the third book, so I imagine I am going to be waiting quite a while). So yeah, maybe I could read a series as the books come out... maybe. I'm still not sure that I would choose to do it again on purpose.

As for the book itself. I enjoyed it, and it was a great book to have on hand far a very rainy Labor Day weekend, keeping me completely entertained as my husband and brother-in-law killed aliens on Playstation3. Harkness does better with her character development in this book, making Diana more likable, Matthew more fully formed, and introducing us to Philippe, Matthew's father, and one of the more compelling characters we've seen thus far. In Shadow of Night, Harkness takes her characters out of the present day and  into a world she, as a historian, is familiar with, Elizabethan London. I believe that as a novelist, she did well to take things into her intellectual wheelhouse, and her writing thrived in a world that provided some historical constraints to her imaginings.

In short, Shadow of Night is not perfect, but the movement of the plot drives things forward and kept me involved. It's a good read. But not one that will stand alone, if you want to get something out of it, you probably have to read A Discovery of Witches first. That being the case, take my advice... wait until the series is finished.