The 'All Souls Trilogy'

I had specifically stocked up a ton of books for these few days of rest at home. Both in borrowed hard copies and in the Kindle. Enforced rest meant that I could read loads and clear backlog. But how much can I inhale in a day? Without meaning to, I've cleared half my backlog of books. Hahahaha.

I finished Deborah Harkness's 'All Souls Trilogy' ('A Discovery of Witches' 2011, 'Shadow of Night' 2012, and 'Book of Life' 2014) in six hours, and that was being generous because I tried to read it slowly. (Except for the romance part, I'm pretty okay with it.) Besides being a professor of history at the University of Southern California, the author is supposedly a descendant from a woman who was hanged in Salem for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

A university historian and reluctant witch Diana Bishop falls for biochemist and neuroscientist, vampire Matthew Clairmont. Predictably, the couple breaks all covenants of the Congregation (a Council made up of nine supernatural species), and obvious persecution follows. Along with the help of many witches and vampires, Diana and Matthew travel back to the past to escape the present assassins. The book calls it time-walking. In between, there's this sacred Manuscript ‘Book of Life’ that holds beguiling mysteries. This is what the entire trilogy is about- 'timewalking' while dealing with individual insecurities and everyone else's neuroses. And introducing vampire-witch hybrid children. Wow. Unraveling the past mysteries, and re-defining the present and re-writing the rules.

As I read, I had the sneaky suspicion that this is a trilogy for television. When I finished it, and googled, I rolled my eyes. The rights to a movie of this book have been sold, but not produced. What has been produced, is a UK eight-episode television series on Sky One titled 'A Discovery of Witches', which premiered in September 2018. Against my better judgment, I watched them. I was quite bored. Hahahah. There'll be a Season 2. 🙄

While the trilogy was fairly enjoyable, and it was also rather forgettable. It doesn't hold the type of plot and narrative that I've come to prefer for fantasy novels. It's not the best fantasy series. The writing wasn't bad at all, but it's lacking in a lot. There're too many odd questions when it comes to time travel paradoxes, and I can't simply suspend disbelief. I'm a very specific sort of reader, and am always skeptical about romance weaved into a fantasy. Sure, love binds us all, but to keep focusing on it will be mildly annoying. I wasn't very absorbed in the created worlds of All Souls.

However, it's interesting to learn what drives the author to create the worlds and delve into Elizabethan history, and I was a tad amused to find out that there was bit of a trigger by Stephenie Meyer's four-book saga 'Twilight'. The novels weren't that well received till the 2008 film adaptation first came out, and that was the crazy spin of two other films based on the novels after that. In a January article, Peter Haldeman for The New York Times wondered if it could be 'All Souls Trilogy: Harry Potter for Grown-Ups?' Hmmmmm. I don't think so. Not for me, at least.

The author said that her books do not cleave to the conventions of genre fiction. Rather, she sees her writing in the vein of J.K. Rowling's: "What is the book you pick up when you're done with Harry Potter? I'd like to think you'd pick up a big set of chunky books like All Souls, which similarly talk about real issues, but issues facing adults, not teenagers.