This review was originally written and published in December 2012.

This book has one of my least favorite tricks for an opening.  In the first paragraph, the narrator talks about how some old book is special, and she knew it was special from the moment she touched it, and everything’s all mysterious and such.  And then…backtrack?  I guess?  After that one paragraph, we start the oh-so-interesting story of how she’s in some library and checking out old manuscripts from the reference section.  It’s a really cheap trick I see all the time, where the author knows that their opening isn’t actually interesting, so they’ll shove in something unrelated as the opening line.  But it does you no good to have a nice ‘hook’ if you can’t continue it for more than a paragraph.  Right now, I’m just annoyed that I’ve been roped in with the promise of a cool old book with powers, and then cheated out of my cool old book of powers.

Dr. Diana Bishop gathers up all her manuscripts and heads back to her desk, but along the way she’s stopped by another scholar who invites her to a Wiccan holiday…service?  meeting?  gathering?  Is there a correct term for that, or is it individualized?  Point is, both these women are Wiccan, but Diana is less orthadox about it, and she doesn’t want to go to this other woman’s group.

My aunt Sarah had always warned me it wasn’t possible for one witch to lie to another, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying.

And this is just weird.  It seems to imply that there really is something tangibly magical about being Wiccan in this book, since Aunt Sarah never said it was wrong to lie to other witches, but rather that it’s impossible.  And Diana never says that she does it anyway, she says that she tries.

God, this is going to be one of those books where they co-opt a real religion and turn it into something paranormal, isn’t it?

threatening the walls I’d erected to separate my career as a scholar from my birthright as the last of the Bishop witches.

Yup, looks like it.

*sigh*

Do we have any Wiccans reading this blog?  Everything I know about it comes from academic research, so feel free to correct me if I make a mistake.

Diana touches the book on the top of the pile and it gives her a little shock, which makes her freak out, because she’s a scholar god damnit, not someone who believes in magic.  And her arguments here are very…disjointed.

I’d renounced my family’s heritage and created a life that depended on reason and scholarly abilities, not inexplicable hunches and spells.

leaving no room for mysteries and no place in my work for what could be known only through a witch’s sixth sense.

Or did it have to do with my family’s connection to witchcraft?

She starts out arguing that magic is all hookum and religious mumbo-jumbo, but then she says that her curiosity might be something that is an actual connection to actual magic.  So what does she really think?  Did she get away from her family’s religion because she doesn’t believe in it?  Or does she believe that magic is real, but she’s trying to distance herself from it for reasons unknown?

And really, what’s the big deal?  She checked out a book about alchemy for her research paper, and now she’s worried that her interest in it is less that academic because it’s a book about alchemy?  All because it shocked her?  This is a hell of a lot of angst for something entirely predictable. 

my mother, Rebecca, was special. Everyone said so. Her supernatural abilities had manifested early, and by the time she was in grade school, she could outmagic most of the senior witches in the local coven with her intuitive understanding of spells, startling foresight, and uncanny knack for seeing beneath the surface of people and events. My mother’s younger sister, my Aunt Sarah, was a skilled witch, too, but her talents were more mainstream: a deft hand with potions and a perfect command of witchcraft’s traditional lore of spells and charms.

Oh…wow.  Just…wow.  Not even trying to hide it, are you, book?

I’m not even sure what to make of this.  Does the book think this is what Wicca is?  Is this supposed to be a real-world reflection of a religion?  Or is this some alternate reality where magic is real and Wiccans aren’t believers of a goddess but are instead the only people who can use/believe in magic?

By then more than a century had passed since Bridget Bishop was executed at Salem.

…

……

One of my least favorite things about stories like this is when they try to play off the people executed in Salem as being real, historical witches.  Which, frankly, is kind of sick.  Salem was a tragedy brought on by hysteria and social pressures in which perfectly innocent people were accused of things that they had no way to deny or disprove.  People were executed from crimes that, not only did they not commit, but that no one could have committed.  To say that these innocent people were being put on trial for something real is just unbelievably insulting to both their memory and history.

Furthermore, I don’t care you think magic is a real thing or not.  Do you want to know what the ‘witchcraft’ of Salem was?  Having sex with the devil.  Participating in ceremonies that were deliberate mockeries of a Catholic Mass.  Putting curses on little girls and dancing naked with demons in the woods.  Orgies.  We’re talking about a completely different idea of magic than what most people day would think of.  You if you sit there and tell me that someone executed in the Salem witch trials really was a witch, that’s what you’re saying they did.  You’re saying they ran out to have a demon orgy and defecate on a crucifix.  No one has ever done that, so stop co-opting this tragic period of history into stories as if it could ever have been in any way true.

I just..I just can’t get over how blatant all this is.  It’s very clear what it’s saying here.  The Bishop family is full of witches – not Wiccans – who do fantasy-variety magic, and we’re supposed to take this as if that’s what’s normal.

I suppose it’s possible that this is an alternate-reality thing, but when the whole concept was introduced as Wicca and Diana called it ‘inexplicable hunches,’ so our only two options are: one, incredibly insulting, or, two, a horrible mish-mash of unclear worldbuilding.

Diana’s father is a “wizard named Stephen Proctor.”  Excuse me?  Proctor?  As in, descendent of John Proctor? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Proctor  Are you fucking kidding me?

What are you trying to say here, book?  That Diana is descendent from a man who beat and sexually abused little girls with ‘spectral’ helpers, then made them swear oaths to the devil?  Because that’s what he was accused of, and you seem to be giving me nothing else to go on with this whole Salem thing.

Do you even know what happened in Salem?  Do you even care?

The book has moved on from any sort of shits about the magic book she found and is now just straight up infodumping about her past, which is making me cry.

In kindergarten I’d asked my friend Amanda’s mother why she bothered washing the dishes with soap and water when all you needed to do was stack them in the sink, snap your fingers, and whisper a few words.

I really should just forget that this book ever said the word Wicca.  Maybe if there’s no further references, I can take all this as the pure fantasy that it’s clearly supposed to be.  Although this (and the other examples she gives of obvious magic from her childhood) makes me wonder why the fuck she thought she should separate herself from this stuff in order to be a scholar.

We’re clearly not talking about a set of beliefs here.  If I watch someone snap their fingers and wash the dishes that way, it has no bearing on my ability to treat the rest of the world imperially.  It’s not a vague set of claims with no proof.  It’s a thing.  It’s a proven thing.  I can believe in a thing that I’ve seen and still be a scholar with no conflicts whatsoever.  So what the fuck is the point of Diana’s drama here, and why did she start this bullshit off by calling it ”inexplicable hunches and spells“?

Humans outnumbered us

And now she’s a different species.  Great.

OMG, this backstory is still going.  Drop the attempts to make it connect to Salam, drop the drama, get on with the damn magic book.  It’s why anyone who read the cover blurb picked up this book in the first place, so fucking do something.

Also, apparently her mother would on occasion totally lose control of her magic because she got ‘distracted’ by something shiny (I shit you not), but her father never had this problem.  Awesome, so, women can have power in this book, they just can’t actually control it.  Because it’s unnatural for a woman to have power, you see, and they’re just not as strong as men and therefore can’t handle it.  Or something.  Yay, feminism. 

I shook myself and focused again on the dilemma that faced me.

YOU HAVE NO DILEMMA.  OPEN THE GOD DAMNED BOOK.

“Anthropologia, or a treatis containing a short description of Man in two parts: the first Anatomical, the second Psychological.” As with most of the works I studied, there was no telling what the contents were from the title.

…  It’s a short description of Man in two parts: the first Anatomical, the second Psychological.  That seems pretty clear to me.  I mean, it’s not like it’s titled something nonsensical.  It’s a straightforward title.  Are you trying to tell me that plain titles often don’t match up with contents, or are you trying to tell me that you’re a moron?  I’d believe both at the moment, since you still are angsting over whether you can academically handle a book about magic when you’ve decided to do a fucking research paper on the subject.  And when you know that magic exisists because you’ve seen it in action and there is nothing about it that prevents you from being a scholar.

It’s not a mystery.  It’s not in conflict.  It’s not like she’s unsure about anything here.  Magic is real, it’s just hidden, because humans outnumber witches and apparently murder them for unrelated demon-sex. 

Aunt Sarah always used her fingers to figure out what was in the mail before she opened it, in case the envelope contained a bill she didn’t want to pay. That way she could plead ignorance when it turned out she owed the electric company money.

So…she lied, just like she could have done without magic.  I mean, what you’re telling me here is that she used magic to find out what was in the envelope, then said she didn’t know what was in the envelope.  You can also open the fucking envelope and then lie. 

Apparently her parents died in some supernaturally suspicious circumstances, and Diana is avoiding magic because she thinks it’s tempting and doesn’t want to get in too deep and end up dead as well.  That’s a much better explanation for all this angst, I’m just not sure why the book bashed me in the head with idiocy before finally spitting out something useful. 

GUESS WHAT GUYS?  THERE’S MORE FUCKING BACKSTORY.  Oh, good god, tell me there’s a plot in this book somewhere, because if you guys hadn’t voted on this, I would have tossed it aside and moved on by now.  This is seriously ridiculous. 

Her aunt raised her and taught her to use her magic.  She’s super smart and went to college at 16.  She’s also an awesome actor, but because her magic actually turns her into the characters.

The boy playing Hamlet became caught up in the illusion, and we had a passionate though dangerously volatile affair. 

She’s 16.  He’s, presumably, 18 or older.  And also, presumably, been magiced into having sex with her.  Ungodly creepy on so many levels.

it was clear that whatever had been unleashed couldn’t be controlled. I wasn’t sure how magic had crept into my acting, and I didn’t want to find out.

First we have another sign of a woman not being able to control her power, and second we’ve got a protagonist who doesn’t want to find things out, which is basically a big “fuck you” to the reader.  Because god knows I don’t read books in order to learn about cool ideas, no.  It’s so much more interesting to be presented with a cool idea and then run away from it.  Or muse for a whole fucking chapter before getting on to the damn alchemy book.

I attempted several more majors, looking for a field so rational that it would never yield a square inch to magic.

I like this a hell of a lot more than “inexplicable hunches and spells”.  Why couldn’t we start with this?

And then, you know, skip her fucking life story because I am unbelievably bored.

Seriously, the bit with the acting and the accidently turning into characters?  And that being why she doesn’t want to even touch anything magic?  That is the only thing that has actually been relevant so far.  That’s it.  That’s all this book needed.  I would be so happy if it had included that, skipped the rest of the bullshit, never mentioned the word ‘coven,’ and moved on to dealing with the damn alchemy book. 

FOCUS, DAMNIT.

The whole point of my work was to show how scientific this pursuit really was. “Alchemy tells us about the growth of experimentation, not the search for a magical elixir that turns lead into gold and makes people immortal.”

…it does both, you moron.  It might have been the start of chemistry and the scientific process, but it still was trying to do shit that’s physically impossible.  A more accurate description (though still oversimplified) would be that it was a transitory subject between magic and true science, but it wasn’t free from what people then believed to be magic, not by a long shot.

Oh my god, this is what we’re going to have to put up with from our ‘smart’ heroine, isn’t it?

“If you say so,” Sarah said doubtfully. “But it’s a pretty strange subject to choose if you’re trying to pass as human.” 

…  You don’t have the market cornered on alchemy.  Humans study that part of history all the time.  You’re stupid, too.

Finally back in the present.  Diana decides (with overdramatic flair) that she’s going to read the magic book as if it’s just another book in her study, instead of…whatever the fuck the other option was.  Still not clear on that.

Seriously, you guys, this is the most dramatic reading of a book ever.  She opens the front cover.  GASP!  She reads the title page.  OH NO! The pages are abnormally heavy.  MOVE THE FUCK ON TO SOMETHING RELEVANT!

This story is dragging so much it’s making me cry.

It gets worse.  She says she’s trying to find “patterns that would reveal a systematic, logical approach to chemical transformation,” but she’s upset because in this book all the pictures have at least one thing wrong.  Well, idiot, that’s because if the patterns were obvious and perfectly consistent, you wouldn’t need a doctoral degree to find them.  Duh.  The development of alchemy as a study and a sciences was a development and not every single alchemic text is going to match up with all the others.  Especially since information sharing wasn’t exactly reliable back then.

Then she discovers there’s words magically hidden on the pages and wonders why anyone would bother when even ‘experts’ can’t read alchemical texts on account of them being so confusing and author, really, would it have killed you to do a modicum of research?

Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn’t fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn’t bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Or they understand that it’s a singularity from a time when mis-copying a picture because you thought the changes looked prettier happened all the time.  This isn’t as ground-breaking as the author wants me to believe, especially since it really should be another in a long pile of not-quite-right illustrations.  The far, far more interesting part of this book is the fact that it has magic hidden writing, and Diana has all but ignored that.

By opening Ashmole 782, I’d breached the wall that divided my magic from my scholarship.

Yeah, still fucking confused on this, book.  The two don’t actually conflict.  The only conflict you’ve actually presented (and inconsistently, at that) is that magic might tempt her and then get away from her, not that it somehow prevents her from learning shit.

It’s like saying you can’t meet aliens, keep that a secret, and go work at NASA. 

And then she decides to just ignore the whole book, because fuck the reader.  After an entire fucking chapter of backstory and head-bashing and emo-whining and confusion, the only thing that had the potential to be interesting is just shoved off to the side, because who needs a main character who’s actually proactive?  Not us!  Apparently.