The opening pages of Deborah Harkness's debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, are a combination of unpromising hokiness and tempting intrigue: Diana Bishop is a historian of science who's also descended from a long line of witches; she's rejected her heritage because she's frightened by the power, even though most of the examples of magic she cites are no more intimidating than Samantha's antics on Bewitched. She's in Oxford to study an ancient alchemical manuscript, which turns out to be under a powerful spell, and the next thing you know every witch, vampire and daemon (brilliant but unstable people whose genius/madness has some supernatural component) around wants to know she saw when she read that book... but the one that really catches her attention is a vampire scientist named Matthew Clairmont.
What emerges is an elaborate but conventional supernatural romance that hits all the usual marks. Matthew isn't just brooding and mysterious because he's the romantic hero; he's also 1,500 years old with all the emotional baggage that would imply (and an illustrious pedigree in a secret society much like the Templars); Diana is too headstrong to do anything Matthew tells her to do, which complicates her life over and over again, as does her prolonged refusal to accept the fact that she's a witch and start dealing with her powers (although this turns out to be more than just willful ignorance). Her alchemical research and his background in genetics and evolutionary biology come together to form a semi-scientific explanation for why creatures such as themselves exist, and why they might be at risk of extinction, even as their blossoming relationship attracts the wrong kind of attention from their peers, because--and somehow nobody had told Diana this until just now--witches and vampires aren't supposed to get involved with each other....
Harkness propels the plot forward relentlessly enough that you're willing to overlook the sillier aspects of the story, however, and she piles detail after detail onto Matthew's family history (including major supporting roles for his vampire mother and her vampire house servant) to increase his dark allure. But then, about two-thirds of the way in, it becomes increasingly obvious this story is nowhere near coming to any sort of neat conclusion, and readers will find themselves simply wondering how Harkness is going to break things off. Ultimately, she chooses to bestow a previously undiscussed witchy power on Diana that caroms her and Matthew in an entirely new direction... and then, abruptly, without any resolution, A Discovery of Witches ends. For some readers, that's liable to be the last straw, but others may have gotten sucked in just deeply enough into the world-shattering romance to want to see what happens next.--Ron Hogan
Shelf Talker: Imagine Twilight with the literary ambitions of Elizabeth Kostova. Be sure to alert customers that, despite its ostensible presentation as a stand-alone story, this is the first of at least two, possibly more volumes.