This one was a real oddity to me, because it felt like that class of Gothic fiction that attempts to take things seriously -- like, the scholarship was spot on, as was the description of academic research, historical detail, and just general academic jockeying -- but then the serious tone slips to the soporific and everyone falls asleep. This book is crazy boring. 

Gothic fiction tends to have a lot of blood and violence in it -- both metaphoric and literal. Wuthering Heights is a fucking bloodbath, an absolute hatecast where very few make it out alive. I mean, sure, Cathy and Heathcliff are terrible people, but hot damn are they fun to watch. If they weren't terrible people no one would care and there wouldn't be a story. High passions are the bloody engine; this is Romanticism run feral. 

So when the writers of modern Gothics try to make everyone sensible and reasonable, I wonder what the point it. People have to be a little touched just to get the juices flowing. Stephenie Meyer, in New Moon, tried to make everyone a good person, which would have been boring, but it turns out her sense of what makes a person worthy is so completely bonkers that the book still kind of works as a Gothic. Edward, Bella, and Jacob are all terrible people, so the hatecast can work its Gothic magic. 

But A Discovery of Witches? Yawn. The lead is the scion of two seriously important magical families, but won't use her magic because reasons that make almost no sense. She wants to succeed in academia on her "own merits," which, isn't magical ability one of her own merits? Anyway, I grew right tired of how helpless she was, and how she was simultaneously a big deal Chosen One type. Own your power, woman. 

Her love interest is a fancy vampire tosser, and their courtship is spent talking about antiques. When they confessed their love for one another, I was like, did I miss something? You're in love with each other over that pile of boring? Which is not something I should ever be saying reading a Gothic; go large or go home. 

Anyway, I don't want to put the knives in too hard. I think the exercise of trying to make rational grownup types enact genres that tend to fall more on the Romance end (by which I mean in the Nathanial Hawthorne sense, not like modern romance novels, exactly) is an interesting one, though I'm not sure I've ever seen one be successful. I'll have to think about it. 

So about halfway through this book, I posted that I liked it, I just didn’t know why, because nothing had happened..

Honestly, at that point, I was thinking: Ok, granted, it’s weird that I’m halfway through, and nothing exciting or dramatic or just something had happened yet, but ok, there were still a lot of pages left, so I let it go, and read on, because as I said, I did like it..

So now, that I’m done, I can let you all know, that no, nothing did in fact happen in the last 50% of the book either..

You might be wondering: “Well, Camilla, it’s a 336 page book, something must have happened?”

And yes, you got me, stuff happened, I guess. Like.. I don't know. Looking at the neighbors. Feeding of the dog. You know, exciting stuff like that?

It’s a story about 3 siblings in their 50’s that come together because of one, count it, ONE incident that happens early on. I guess that is literally “something that happens” in the book, but sadly it isn’t dramatic in any way. Any way.

It could have been about Jim, Bob or Susan’s (the siblings, btw) trip to the nearest 7/11, that’s how exciting that incident turned out to be.

Ok, we do also have Jim’s incident 90% later in the book, but again = Zzzzzz…

Nothing happened!

The weird thing is, I did like it, or I liked the writing, I should say. It’s an easy read, and you do want to like the characters, it’s just hard when nothing happens!

This book was boring with a capital Z.

The audiobook felt as if it was 24 hrs. long instead of 12 – not the fault of the narrator (which was pretty good) but because the way the book was structured. There were only 15 chapters going from 35 min. to 1 hr. in length and a good chunk of them were dedicated to long, repetitive monologues from almost every imaginable character about the horribleness of War. We hear about it from one of the victims, the students, the teachers, the police, the barmaids, even the VILLAINS, for goodness’ sake! I think all that harping was completely unnecessary as any person with two brain cells can figure out on their own the terrible consequences of war.