The Book of Life (Movie Tie-In): A Novel (All Souls Series)

Back in their present, Matthew and Diana must deal with grief, the realities of becoming parents, and the complex and dangerous dynamics of creature politics and vampire families; Diana must embrace her weaver magic, and Matthew must deal with his blood rage.

(Though reviews are inherently subjective, I prefer to provide some organization to my opinions through the use of a personal rubric. The following notes may contain spoilers.)

Plot and Setting: 4.8 -- Plot is engaging from start to finish. Has many unique elements, no major holes, and a sense of focus. Setting is clear and believable. Timeline may be a bit hard to follow. Again, a story with many facets, tied together by Diana and Matthew's relationship and the difficult things they each must learn to accept about themselves, particularly as they become parents and as they navigate the dangerous waters of creature politics. True love, danger, sacrifice, and all that good stuff. Good landmarks to keep track of time passing, but quite a few larger leaps through time, which is a bit disorienting.

Characters: 5 -- Relatable, realistic, interesting, dynamic characters. Even minor characters have depth, as do the relationships between characters. All the characters continue to be complex and brilliant. They grow and develop and challenge and help each other, and it's great. Diana is interesting in this one: her unusual, supernatural characteristics take over in more and more ways, and yet she is still very much herself most of the time. And of course there are babies, and people relating to babies, which is always a chance for adorableness and deep emotion.

Mechanics and Writing: 5 -- Few, if any, typos, punctuation issues, or word errors. (<3/100pgs) Intelligent use of POV. Skillful writing that adds to the story. I actually only spotted one error in the entire book, and it was a trivial one. POV is mainly 1st-person Diana, with some scenes (mostly when Diana is not present to narrate, but not always) in a sort of universal 3rd-person narrative, dipping into the thoughts of whoever is needed to tell the important details. The POV in this one did start out a little strangely, as it took a little while to get back to Diana's familiar narration, and sometimes we are shown Diana from someone else's perspective, which was a bit disconcerting.

Redeeming Value: 3.2 -- Partially focused uplifting themes or lessons. Drugs, alcohol, violence, etc, are not glorified, though there is definitely shaky ground. Several mildly explicit sex scenes. Implied moral guidelines for behavior. This one feels darker and more violent; Benjamin is truly evil and depraved, using rape, torture, and murder to further his own agenda, or just for the fun of it. And Peter Knox is right up there with him. Several sex scenes between Matthew and Diana, but again, they may be fairly explicit, but not gratuitous. Strong themes of honesty and acceptance, bravery and love.

Personal Enjoyment: 4.5 -- I loved it. Highly enjoyable and very entertaining, with perhaps an issue or two that tempered my pleasure. I’d enjoy reading it again.

'The Book of Life' is breathtaking and amazing. It's everything that was incredible about the last two books (excepting, of course, the historical fiction aspect of 'Shadow of Night'), with the added benefit that finally, all the questions are answered, and most of the loose ends tied up. I loved it without reservations. There are so many things I want to share about the book and my reactions to it, but I can't tell you some of the best parts because, well, spoilers.

The first few chapters start off slowly, as Diana deals with her grief over a missing character and she and Matthew adjust to the world to which they've returned. Soon the pace quickens, and the revelations start piling up, one discovery upon another. Plot twists and surprising turns abound, making for a thrilling read; I could hardly turn the pages fast enough in my eagerness to see what came next.

Many old friends and enemies appear, several of them quite unexpectedly, and there are a few terrific new additions to the cast of characters (well, new or expanded; some of them had cameos in the first book.) Diana and Matthew occupy center stage, of course, joined by various members of their expanding family as well as allies. The complexities and challenges of vampire family life, particularly in the de Clermont family, drive some of the plot, as do the politics of the Congregation. The race is still on to find the missing papers, locate Ashmole 782 and discover its secrets, but there are other threats and challenges to meet as well.

Harkness is an articulate, intelligent, and insightful author, and her scholarly training and meticulous research are evident throughout -- nowhere more so than in the scenes set at Yale and in Oxford. Genetics plays a big part in the novel, as does historical research. Harkness also excels at bringing her world alive, whether it's the sixteenth-century London of 'Shadow of Night' or the Yale, Oxford, London, New Orleans, and Venice of 'The Book of Life' (to name but a few of the book's many settings.) It's clear that she's been to these places; she provides vivid, evocative details that never overshadow the scene's main focus.

And while Harkness has always had a sense of humor, it is more evident in this novel. Not that the book as a whole is comic; on the contrary, it's suspenseful, touching, exhilarating, heartwarming, and chilling by turns. But the comic moments, when they appear, are funny enough at times to have startled shouts of laughter out of me. (I thought of quoting one, but I don't want to ruin the fun of stumbling across them.) She has even put herself in the book! There's a marvelous but almost throwaway line when Diana is recalling the people who had access to a particular manuscript (not Ashmole 782), and one of them is a writer of popular fiction with an interest in alchemy.

'The Book of Life' enthralled me from start to finish. It's one of the finest series enders I've ever read: satisfying on every level, yet leaving me wishing for more. I can't wait to see what Deborah Harkness does next. For now, I'll have to settle for reading the whole trilogy again.

Diana Bishop, witch and historical scholar, is now wed to the vampire and scientist, Matthew Clairmont; together they are seeking to discover several scientific facts about their DNA. For Matthew seeks to understand the composition of his “blood rage,” Diana seeks to learn more about the “weaving” skills she possesses that seriously affect the magic she is learning to control in her magic; and finally they seek the missing pages of the magical alchemical book Ashmole 782, which is “The Book of Life.” These major characters are assisted by a covey of witches from New York, thwarted by Matthew’s evil son, Benjamin, and assisted by other scientists who are human, vampire, and members of the Congregation of Witches. This is normally a highly unlikely union as vampires and witches are usually highly suspicious of each other and are more enemies than colleagues. Add to the intense tension arising from Matthew and Diana’s reappearance from the 1500s to the present the fact that Diana is now pregnant with twins. Will they be vampire, witch or human? Will they possess the devastatingly destructive blood rage that Matthew has learned to control? How will the virulent enmity of Matthew’s son and the orders of the leader of Matthew’s family affect Matthew and Diana’s relationship? Ashmole 782 is the quest and the reader will be stunned by the gradually revealed truths about the composition of this book of magic and the reasons why many characters will do anything to find the missing pages and thus gain possession and power of the ancient tome! The Book of Life… is carefully plotted, with tender and endearing moments of passion and love between Matthew and Diana; beautiful descriptions of several pivotal places, scenes of fierce conflict in which the battles increase the closer the characters come to the answers to each mystery they seek to solve, and detailed scenes involving the skilled analysis of DNA common, yet unique, to the witches and vampires in this quest. While this may annoy some readers, it is actually quite necessary to provide credibility to the rest of the mystery of the main characters and the Book of Life. Deborah Harkness is a skilled writer who has crafted a very different trilogy of novels that educates the reader about witches and vampires, avoids the stereotypical treatment of this topic, and succeeds in presenting an intelligent, albeit fictional, treatment of some historical realities about witches and vampires. It’s quite an achievement and not for those who want a light read. The Book of Life is fiction about the paranormal, history, science, romance, the supernatural and more, a noteworthy and memorable read! This is highly recommended, fiction written by an author who knows how to develop and embellish a great story!

Deborah Harkness's All Soul's Trilogy, which I just finished, will, I believe, become a classic of the fantasy/romance genre. Readers start with A Discovery of Witches, travel back in time with Shadow of Night and end up, very satisfactorily, with The Book of Life. In Book 1, A Discovery of Witches we meet Diana Bishop and Matthew de Clermont, as they fall in love at first sight in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in London. Once Diana fills out that call slip which brings forth a mysterious and unreadable book, Ashmole 782, every single "person" sitting anywhere in that library starts creeping closer to Diana. When she can't decipher the book she sends it back, but not without riling more than a few library patrons. Matthew rescues her.

Diana is a witch, but she has been spellbound and doesn't know it. Matthew is a vampire, but he is totally unlike any vampire we have ever met so far in literature or on either the big or small screen and he is so much more. I doubt there is a single female reader who would not wish that she was the one that Matthew assisted in the library that fateful day. There may even be more than a few men who feel that same way.

Diana knows how to be a professor but she has no idea how to be a witch. In Book 2, Shadow of Night, she travels back in time to find great teachers who will call forth her talents. She is more talented than anyone imagined. While in the past Diana marries her vampire (well who wouldn't) in spite of the Congregation, which rules vampires, witches, and daemons ("creatures"), and which has made cross-creature marriage illegal. Diana arrives back in the present in Book 3, The Book of Life pregnant with Matthew's babies, absolutely a taboo according to the Congregation (and thought to be impossible).

In The Book of Life Diana and Matthew must deal with Matthew's family, Matthew's evil son, Benjamin (possessed of the "blood rage" from which Matthew and his other children also suffer), the birth of the twins, the shock felt by the entire community of "creatures" and the censure of the Congregation. In order to deal with all of this Diana and Matthew must find the two pages that are still missing from Ashmole 782, which they know as The Book of Life, and then Diana must go back to the Bodleian and call back Ashmole 782 to make the book whole. She is sure it contains lost knowledge about witches, vampires and daemons, knowledge which will make the Congregation change the Covenant, will make her marriage to Matthew legal, and will keep her new babies from being assassinated.

Yale University, the college where Diana Bishop teaches plays a key role in Book 3. Matthew's blood rage has long driven him to study vampire genealogy and DNA. Others believed that witches and vampires, being separate species could not procreate and yet here is Diana pregnant and eventually presenting the de Clermont family with the twins conceived of Matthew; Rebecca and Philip. What the very tolerant, congenial, and scientific colleagues at Diana's campus find out about "creature" DNA and what Diana eventually learns from The Book of Life is surprising and makes an important plea for tolerance that resounds in the real world occupied by us as humans. (You can form your own judgment about whether "creatures" are real or not.)

I love the academic settings for these books which form a sort of library sandwich. Harkness's vampires will have you clamoring for someone to take a bite of you. The skills that Diana finds that belong to her, the most talented in a long line of witches, are also enviable and very effectively written, full of symbolism and connections with antiquity, but I must not describe them in detail. There are no daemons among the true main characters in this book but we see several examples, both good and evil, of this class of creature.

I was very happy with Book 3 which answers our questions, contains the penultimate battle, and gives us some of the happy endings that bring equal happiness to our reader's hearts. All this, and those connections that can be drawn with our human perceptions of race and DNA, make this an excellent trilogy indeed. I am sad that it is done, as I always am whenever I finish a very enjoyable and engrossing novel or series of novels. We look forward to whatever else you may write; Deborah Harkness, but these books will stand the test of time.

You hear the words engrossing, addictive, and enchanting in multitudes of literary reviews on a #1 New York Times Bestseller from a bestselling author. The positive reviews flood Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, Goodreads, etc. Those that followed the story of Diana and Matthew, witch and vampire, from the start have been waiting with feverish anticipation since that heartbreaking moment in the series when one finishes the second book only to realize that the next one is quite a ways away from publication. Those that hadn't heard of the series until now were spared this anguish and may have picked up the novel out of curiosity over the hype or a recommendation from a friend. Whether you are one who has just discovered this series and has been reading them in rapid succession, or, like me, someone who has waited for some time to read this final installment only to realize after the first few pages that details forgotten required you to re-read books one and two before proceeding... you cannot regret picking up these books.

All the praise is earned, but what's sometimes overlooked is the brilliance of Deborah Harkness. She writes with intelligence and insight. She weaves worlds, words, and stories together the way Diana weaves spells... skillfully and thoughtfully. There is no doubt that Diana and Matthew have a large supporting cast, but you get to know them and welcome them into this family of characters that, like a real family, help to build the world being described adding the same richness and texture that's added to your life by the stories of those that surround you in your own life.

You could read this book many times and find something new. You will miss Philippe in book three as much as Diana, Matthew, and Ysabeau do. You will smile at Ysabeau and her matter-of-fact family values and loyalty. You will enjoy Miriam's sarcasm, and you will realize that you've been lucky to have read something so masterful after it's all said and done. Not all scholars are authors and not all authors are scholars. Deborah Harkness claims neither but is both. You will thank her for being able to transport you into the world she created of wit and wisdom, struggle and family, magic and science, yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows... you will be satisfied. You will feel that you are waving good-bye to a big crazy family that you hope to see again and know that if you ever need to... they're only a page turn away.

I waited patiently (or maybe not so patiently) for Deborah Harkness’s The Book of Life, the last book in her All Souls Trilogy. And it was well worth the wait.

Harkness does a great job of finishing off this trilogy, which is wonderful. In the first two books, we watched witch Diana Bishop discover the depth and breadth of her powers with the help of her husband, vampire Matthew Clermont. Together with a large retinue of family and friends, the two of them work to discover the secret in Ashmole 782, also known as the Book of Life, before other, nefarious ‘creatures’ can discover what is written in its elusive pages.

Harkness does a fantastic job of involving almost every character brought to light in this book. It’s enthralling reading; just as you’ve started to wonder what happened to a witch, or a vampire. or a daemon, Harkness brings them back into the story in a way that doesn’t seem contrived.

Another wonderful bonus of this trilogy is that this story is finished, and finished well, but there are many other stories left to be told. I don’t know if it was intentional, but I was left hoping that Harkness would take the time to write a book about some of the other characters. What will happen to Marcus and Phoebe? How about Gerbert? Agatha Wilson? What is Jack’s story? And Father Hubbard would be a book of his own. There are stories and stories of witches and vampires just waiting to be told.

But, if Harkness never told another story about any of these creatures, I would be okay. The trilogy had a definite ending, one that satisfied me.

Thank you Deborah Harkness for creating such an intelligent book about a fantastical world. I didn’t feel like a I needed to check my brain at the door to read about witches or vampires. Thank you for weaving a wonderful story that involves magic, history, adventure, and history. Thank you for giving me a place to lose myself, at least for awhile.

The literary community has long awaited a fantasy title, specifically one labeled as “paranormal romance”, that supersedes the trite additions to the genre that are many recent Young Adult fantasy novels. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, for all its strength of characterization, was poorly plotted and her depiction of vampires unimpressive. Conversely, Deborah Harkness provides a fresh and engaging supernatural tale for readers with more serious tastes, and more life experience, shall we say, than the target audiences of Meyers or J. K. Rowling.

A Discovery of Witches introduces Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar who specializes in history, alchemy, and the occult. A latent witch who has spent her entire adult life suppressing her magical powers, both physically and psychologically, Diana accidentally calls forth a magical volume during the course of her research. After examination, Diana discovers that the book, Ashmole 782, is a palimpsest, part alchemical manuscript and part spell book. She promptly banishes it to the stacks, but her discovery sparks a flood of magical encounters, including the appearance of the mysterious vampire and celebrated geneticist Matthew Clairmont, a fellow Oxford colleague and a fellow of All Souls College. Pursued by those who would force her to recall Ashmole 782 and use it for their own ends, Diana must reluctantly trust Professor Clairemont. As the danger increases and Diana begins to awaken to her magical heritage, so too does her emotional connection to Matthew. She eventually flees Oxford with the scientist and sequesters herself in the Clairemont ancestral home in France, where Diana’s presence is barely tolerated by Matthew’s formidable mother. The conclusion of Harkness’ debut novel leaves Diana emotionally and physically scarred, full of more questions than answers.

Harkness is an American scholar of history and the occult, which is unsurprising given her heroine’s profession. Her background gives weight to the historical elements of her novel and provides a plethora of allusion and references to excite the discerning reader. One such example is the revelation in Shadow of Night, Harkness’ second novel, that Matthew is a member of the mysterious “School of Night,” a shadowy group in history which was supposed to include such literary and political figures as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland.

It is refreshing to see a novel, and a debut one at that, that moves beyond the angst-riddled stereotypes of paranormal fantasy and delivers a mature story with thought-provoking themes. Despite containing a forbidden romance, Discovery is not a love- and blood-soaked vampire story. Rather, it is a book that considers the vision, conflicts, and implications of a society where different races might live peaceably in harmonious coexistence, genetics reveals the final piece to the puzzle to our complicated our human ancestry, and female agency is realized.

In the world of Harkness’ novel, vampires, witches, and daemons share the Earth with “normal” humans, living in varying degrees of anonymity. One of the most intriguing concepts Harkness develops is the way the various magical races gravitate towards particular professions. For example, vampires are scientists and doctors, witches pursue the humanities, while daemons are adept financial and political figures. The novel’s development of this element lends maturity and realism to an otherwise fantastical tale. Far from complicating the story, this situation provides a backdrop for Diana’s efforts to bring about equality in the human and magical community.

Diana is a strong female protagonist. Her background as a professor, and now as a witch, makes her a daunting counterpart to Matthew, the centuries-old vampire and celebrated scholar. She not only compliments him as a romantic companion, her integrity makes him a better man. Although Diana often counteracts Matthew’s orders (this is no meek and submissive woman), she does so for very logical reasons that always have her loved one’s best interests at heart.

While Harkness’ debut novel is surprisingly immersive, the plotting at times leaves much to be desired. Sex (implied and understood, never explicit) is sometimes used to solve the relationship issues of two alpha characters, Diana and Matthew, leading to several cringe-worthy moments (unless you enjoy that sort of thing). Characterization of supernatural races, particularly vampires and their social position, is often trite, specifically in the stereotype of a middle-class awe for the fabulously wealthy, privileged, and dizzyingly attractive vampire. The novel’s pacing is inconsistent, sometimes ejecting the reader from the immersive experience by drawing out a pause in the action for too long. Finally, Discovery would have benefited from more perspectives, particularly from the Daemons, a race which is left, perhaps unintentionally, by the wayside as the novel and the series progresses.

Despite its drawbacks, A Discovery of Witches is a book well-worth the read. While by no means a literary masterpiece, it is appropriately light for winding down after a long day (or semester), yet intriguing enough to capture the interest of a wide-range of readers. I recommend it.

The final book in the All Souls Trilogy, The Book of Life, had a great deal to live up to in terms of storylines, characters, plot reveals, reader expectations and, in many ways, it doesn’t disappoint. Whereas the second book, Shadow of Night, had vampire, Matthew Clairmont and witch, Diana Bishop, roaming the streets of Elizabethan London and encountering a veritable roll-call of historical icons, the third book is very much set in the present, even if it’s global in scope and enormous in execution. Characters from previous books return, new ones also appear and the tension and hostility between warring factions within families, supernatural races and members of the Congregation finally come to a head. Vengeance is either meted out or channelled into areas that are more productive and the power that we knew Diana Bishop held within and was struggling to control is finally unleashed. Matthew and Diana’s relationship is tested – not their faith in or love for each other, but through separation and the tasks they must undertake individually to save the family and bloodline from potential extinction. Playing on the themes of power, control, miscegenation (probably the paramount themes of the book if not the series and references to the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews underpins this), betrayal, genetics, science, knowledge, as well as love, family, understanding and tolerance, Harkness concludes this series in a mostly very gratifying way. In terms of the writing, apart from some repetitive scenes at the beginning, it is lovely. The descriptive passages are eloquent and the ones where Diana gets to wield her power can be masterful. The more grisly scenes (and there are some really horrendous torture scenes unpacked for us) are horrible because they are so well written if somewhat graphic – but hey, this is about supernatural creatures. You can almost feel the flesh being flensed, every moment of the pain being inflicted and it physically hurts to have characters you care about rendered so impotent if not destroyed (though we don’t feel nearly the same degree of compassion or revulsion when it’s a Bishop-Clairmont enemy). Having said that, offsetting these are scenes of utter joy – such as childbirth. But, I do think they became a bit twee and went on a bit long, especially in a book dedicated to vampires, witches and daemons. There’s also the sexual politics in the book where Matthew, as a vampire (along with other male members of his clan), impose their will upon and try to subordinate the females. Diana offers a challenge to this anachronistic patriarchal viewpoint and it’s to Harkness’s credit that she doesn’t succumb to political correctness, but both explores the animalistic nature of the vampires, their desire to protect a “mate” and also contemporary attitudes to gender roles, and has characters negotiating around these. In the end, the male vampires concede they need to change their approach and the feeling the reader is left with is that this is genuine and marks a real shift in the gender dynamics. Though, I confess, I was worried Harkness had come over all Twilight on us for a while – first with gender roles and then with cute babies that are powerful - fortunately, she hadn’t. Harkness uses a shifting POV in this novel, including segueing from first to third person and, because this is the only novel in the series to do it, I am not sure it is as successful as it could have been had it been used throughout. It’s a wrench, occasionally, to move from one POV to the other and I generally love that kind of approach (think of Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor etc; I also use it in some of my own novels). While it does give the reader a specific insight into Diana’s thinking, Harkness’ control of her subject and character was already so good, I am not persuaded this was necessary. While I found the initial chapters a little confusing (often the way between books in a trilogy) once Harkness hits her stride, so does the reader and there were parts of the book I couldn’t put down. Intelligent, considered, even poetic and able to make the alternate worlds of the vampires, witches and daemons, their politics and the science they want to uncover, let alone the nature of The Book of Life, believable is a monumental task and I think Harkness more than succeeds. Certainly, it’s one of the finest trilogies involving supernatural creatures around and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Slightly pretentious Twilight-spawn, actually, as if all of this highbrow attention to history and science and art could obscure the fact that we're still talking about two stories where an obscenely wealthy and dangerous old vamp falls in love with a mousy, not-very interesting human and their love is obsessive and forbidden, and over the course of the series Mousy Girl gets her groove back and becomes Queen of the Mary Sues, and when the couples breed the Powers That Be are disgusted and afraid of the unknown dangers that these rare forbidden vampire-hybrid babies represent, and vow to wipe out the whole Cullen/de Clermont clan.

That said, there's a reason Twilight made Stephanie Meyer rich, and there's a reason all of these books are bestsellers. Mock all you want, with good reason (and even Harkness mocks, when her vampires haughtily insist they don't sparkle), but the fact is, these books are entertaining. Twilight lets you shut off your brain and get carried away in the fantasy of forbidden attraction; All Souls takes you on the same journey without shutting off your brain.

I read A Discovery of Witches in February 2011, with no idea it was the start of a trilogy, and when I got to the cliffhanger ending, I was so gobsmacked it took me several days before I could sleep again. When Shadow of Night came out in 2012, I got an ARC copy and took a week's vacation so I could savor it properly. But since then, I've moved house, had a second baby, weathered a lot of changes at work, and I'm generally a lot busier, and so when the long-awaited final book in the All Souls Trilogy showed up on my Kindle, while I was excited to see it, I didn't have time to drop everything and devour it. Moreover, I didn't have time to re-read the first two books to refresh my memory, which in retrospect would have been very helpful. Consequently, I spent the first quarter of The Book of Life catching up on vaguely remembered details from the complicated world Harkness developed in the previous books.

The Book of Life picks up more or less where Shadow of Night leaves off: time-traveling supernatural power couple Diana Bishop (a witch) and Matthew Clairmont (a vampire) have returned to the present day from 1590, where Diana was learning how to use her rare spell-weaving powers from the more powerful witches of that age. (One of the overarching plot issues is that the magical world is weakening in the modern age: witches cast less effective spells, vampires are less able to make new vampires, and daemons are more prone to insanity than genius.) Diana is pregnant with twins, a secret which will get them in very hot water with the Congregation (the governing council of the magical creatures), because witches, daemons, and vampires aren't allowed to marry outside their own kind, much less reproduce.

Book of Life ties up the convoluted strands of the series-wide plot: the search for the ancient manuscript, Ashmole 782, that all of the creatures believes holds the key to their survival; the long-anticipated confrontation with the Congregation over Diana and Matthew's forbidden relationship; the explanation (and solution) to the problem of weakening magic. In reaching these conclusions, the book delves deeply into a lot of less central subplots: there is a lot of time devoted to the gordian knot of political and familial loyalties and obligations in the de Clermont vampire clan, a lot of time devoted to the analysis of genetic material in the pages from Ashmole 782 and DNA-testing of various magical creatures, and a lot of time devoted to traveling and describing the many settings of this book, including various locations in France, upstate New York, New Haven, London, New Orleans, Oxford, Venice, and Chelm, Poland.

The entire series has been plagued by pacing problems. Deborah Harkness's attention to detail is at once the series' greatest strength and also its greatest weakness. The extensive descriptions of places, people, history, furniture, art, and so on make the reader feel like s/he is right there in the story, but sometimes Harkness gives us more detail than we could possibly need. In A Discovery of Witches, the never-ending descriptions of Diana's clothes and meals made me crazy. In Shadow of Night, Harkness told us more about arcane alchemical processes than any reader (except perhaps a Ph.D. candidate) could possibly care to know. -And here in Book of Life, perhaps more than ever, the details get in the way of the story.

Let me explain: As the capstone of the trilogy, Book of Life is the climax the whole series (all 1800 pages of it) has been building to. The reader therefore has a sense of urgency in seeing how certain plots resolve that the detailed narrative often frustrates. Some examples: Matthew's mother, Ysabeau, gets held prisoner early on by the Congregation. Despite expressing some concern about it (and after learning why imprisonment might be especially traumatic to Ysabeau given her history), Matthew and Diana hie off to the States and spend several months gardening and cleaning the Bishop homestead in New York rather than working on a plan to free her. Later, they learn that the Book of Life's main villain is holding a witch hostage and repeatedly raping her, trying to breed with her. Matthew and Diana express horror and outrage... and then go to Yale and spend several more weeks futzing around in labs and libraries. Then, Diana has a pregnancy complication and gets put on bed rest while she and Matthew are on separate continents. Rather than rushing to her side, Matthew spends a week carving infant cradles. Later still, Matthew himself is a hostage of the Big Baddie, and Diana hurries to France... to feed her babies. Now, as a relatively new mom myself, I get that babies need to be fed, but surely not even the most hard-core breastfeeding enthusiasts would object to the sitter offering a little bit of formula so that Mom can go save Daddy from Mortal Peril.

The baby plot was almost as ridiculous and cringeworthy in Book of Life as it was in Breaking Dawn. The birthing scene was less horrifying, thank God, and the Bishop-de Clermont babies have reasonably normal names and growth patterns, but they still prefer blood to milk, and there's a ridiculous scene in which Diana tells her husband that their daughter is "not a vampire. She's a vampitch. Or a wimpire." (p. 424). Seriously?!

Book of Life has a point of view problem (as does Breaking Dawn, now that I think of it). Some of the book is written in first-person POV, as narrated by Diana. Some of the book is in third-person POV, usually limited to Matthew or other characters, but sometimes almost omniscient. Whatever rhyme or reason there may have been to the POV changes, I found them jarring and unnecessary.

One plot I wish the series had developed more fully (and I say that with some hesitation, when there were so many plots that could and maybe should have been pared down), is the issue of Diana's mortality. Unlike Twilight's Bella, Harkness's protagonist has no intention of becoming a vampire. That means this is a story of a timeless, all-consuming love between a woman who will live a mere handful of decades compared to her husband's millennia. Perhaps the most empowering aspect of this love affair (especially contrasted with Twilight) is that both Diana and Matthew are happy with Diana the way she is, and don't wish to change her... but I still think they need to confront the issues in a more meaningful way. At one point, Matthew tells Diana that his greatest wish is to grow old with her, which of course can't happen -- Diana's response is to conjure him a few grey hairs for Christmas, a wholly unsatisfactory answer to a real and pressing problem.

Reading over my review, it all sounds more negative than my actual reading experience reflects. I have a lot of nitpicky complaints, but overall, this book, and this series, is great entertainment. It's long and complicated and full of delicious (and sometimes maddening) detail, and the romance is compelling and the stakes are sky-high, and for a lot of people (including me) the All Souls trilogy is total reading catnip. I envy newcomers to the series who have the time to dive into all three books and read them in one epic 1,800 page binge, all at once, because I bet the story would be all the more transporting and satisfying that way, rather than interrupted by the long wait between book releases.