"All Souls" Trilogy Review

  Hello, and welcome to my blog again! Today I am bringing you an article about a fantasy-romance-history novels by Deborah Harkness. While reading these three books, I fell in love with the whole story and really started to admire the writer for her abillity to make a story seem real, but also romantic and full of magic. If you like a good fantasy novel with magic and supernatural creatures with romance on the top, you will adore this trilogy!

  I´ve read these books during the spring and I was left without breath how much I liked them. For anyone who likes fantasy stories about vampires and witches, and perhaps likes to explore history or likes to add some romance to a good adventure novel, this books are the real thing. Personally, I find most of the modern fantasy books with witches and vampires and demons and other kinds of imaginary creatures kind of childish and actually just funny. I think that it is rear to find a really good fantasy book with these kinds of characters, but this one is really special. The thing that amazed me the most is how realistic the whole story is. Everything has its reason, its origin, and everything is just perfectly imagined. Also, this story has it all; vampires, witches and demons as a new intelligent kind of species on Earth except humans, magic based on the Paganism, forbidden love, mystic libraries and alchemist books, even travelling through past. Deborah Harkness has written an amazing story, that is one thing I can tell you for sure.

 Shortly, the story follows young witch called Diana Bishop. Diana is a historian mostly dedicated to the history of alchemy. Her parents died in Africa when she was a child, both of them very powerful magicians, and she was raised by her two aunts Emily and Sarah. Although her aunts tried to teach her magic, she decided to let her abilities stay hidden. One day, in library, Diana asks for book called Ashmole 782 and that book makes her feel weird. She doesn´t know that leaders of each of the intelligent species beside humans – witches, demons and vampires – search for that book because each one of them believes that it contains important informations about the origin of their kind. She also doesn´t know that she has accidentally removed a spell from the book. Through the whole serial of books, Diana will try to get the book back to discover what does it really contains, but the problem is that the book mysteriously disappeared!

 Meanwhile, Diana is going to meet Matthew Clairmont, a vampire with who she shall fall in love with. But Diana still doesn´t want to have anything to do with sorcery. She only wants to lead a normal life, but that is now simply impossible because witches, demons and vampires are always around her and they want to know the secret – how did she get Ashmole 782? And how powerful is she really? Her parents were two of the most powerful magicians of their time and Diana must have some of their incredible power.

 Her relationship with Matthew is not allowed because witches and vampires, or demons and witches, or any other combination of species is forbidden. The two of them will have to travel a lot not to get captured by the leading council of the three supernatural kinds, they shall also travel through time which is one of the special abilities Diana has inherited from her incredibly powerful parents. They will face many problems, fight many battles, make many sacrifices to stay together and find out what Diana really is and what kind of hidden powers she has.

 I mentioned how the realistic perspective in this book amazed me. Now I will explain what do I mean by saying that. Matthew is a scientist and he dedicated his work to find out how did vampires, witches and demons start to exist and is their origin connected. Everything about these three kinds is imagined very logically. For example, Matthew took Diana´s DNA to find out what elements she, as a witch, posses, and found out that she has all four elements in her DNA. Of course, in the book, it is described more expertly. 

 The serial contains three books: 

1. A Discovery of Witches

In the first part, we get into the story, we get to know how Diana is living and what she knows about her past and present. She is a historian and professor at The University of Oxford. She finds Ashmole 782 which, after she opened it, disappeared. Diana meets Matthew Clairmont and their problems begin.

2. Shadow of Night

Diana and Matthew travel back to the 16^th century where Matthew takes part as himself from that time, since he has lived for more than thousand years. At that time, he worked for the queen and was a member of organization made of intellectuals from that time. Deborah Harkness took a perspective of an expert in history while writing this part, she mentioned many people from history and stayed objective. Diana now more and more about her powers because witches that she meets in the past will show her what she really is.

3. The Book of Life

The last part of the trilogy gets us back to the present where Diana and Matthew are going to face make looses, but also get something beautiful. We can read about their last fights to stay together and the final liberation of Diana´s powers.

Matthew and Diana in the TV series

 The critics for this trilogy are also really good. Some say that it is way too complicated ( Shadow of Night ), but it is mostly rated as interesting “melding of scientific and historical details” (Paula L. Woods of the Los Angeles Times ). San Antonio Express-News described it as "rare historical novel that manages to be as intelligent as it is romantic [and] it is supernatural fiction that those of us who usually prefer to stay grounded in reality can get caught up in." Which is exactlly what I liked the most while reading it.

 Also, there is a television series based on the book which was completed in February this year. It is called A Discovery of Witches and main actors are Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer.  

  I hope that you have enjoyed reading and that I awoke your interest for this amazing trilogy. The next article will be something really exciting ( or it is at least exciting to me ) because tommorow I am leaving Croatia and I am going to be travelling untill the next weekend and when I come back, I will write my review of the trip.