At some point I’d kicked off my right slipper, leaving my foot trailing over the edge of the bed.

Aren’t you just so glad you know that?  Wasn’t that just so vital to the story?  Doesn’t that tell you so much about Diana’s character?

What’s that you say?  It’s completely pointless and pure fluff and filler?  Yes.  It’s also about 80% of every word written.  Just fluff and filler and bullshit.

Diana wakes up late and tells us that she looks like her mother.  While staring in a mirror.  Yes, indeed, we’ve got another case of a character staring in a mirror to shoe-horn in a description.  God save me from terrible writing.  And four chapters in, at that!  You’d think we’d have gotten a clear idea of her before now, but no.  We had to learn what she smells like before even getting an age.  (We still don’t have an age.)

Fatigue also managed to lengthen my nose and render my chin more pronounced.

Um….???

She gets to the library and the staff is all a twitter about someone who’s coming in, as if this weren’t a famous library that got famous scholars in all the time or something.  As Diana is getting her books, she learns that Matthew is sitting right next to her assigned desk, so she switches to a different one.  When she gets there, she of course has to tell us what his outfit looks like again.

A peek under the table revealed charcoal gray trousers, matching socks, and black shoes that surely cost more than the average academic’s entire wardrobe.

Diana, darling, why are you looking under his desk?  Hoping to catch sight of something besides his socks, maybe?

There’s an awful lot of angst going on here about how Diana is uncomfortable and doesn’t want to be in the same room as a vampire who is sitting quietly and reading, and yet she won’t consider just going to a different damn room.  Nor does she consider ignoring him; instead she decides to needle him with snide comments.  I really don’t have patience for characters who whine incessantly about things that they could fix.

She asks why he’s in the library, and he explains that he showed up the previous day for purely academic reasons and just happened to watch her use pointless magic on a book.

“I thought scientists didn’t believe in coincidences anymore.”

He laughed softly. “Some have to believe in them.”

…why the fuck would a scientistnot believe in coincidences?  That seems more like something you say to someone who believes in…well, magic.  (And fate, and to some extent, various religions.)

Oh, and throughout, the text keeps trying to convince me that he’s “charming,” even though he’s holding a rather bland conversation.

Valerie [a library attendant] said, gazing at him raptly and turning pink. The vampire had charmed her with no more than a thank-you.

There’s just something about this that I can’t decide on.  Either it’s supposed to be that he really is charming, and this book confused actual charm with ‘being pretty.’  Or, he’s using supernatural magic-charm, in which case that’s a bit of writing fail since Diana’s only reaction to him as been fear.  If he has magic-charm, I want to see some sign of that, which means that the text needs to be clear that his charm is unnatural.  If you act too blasé about the whole thing, unless you’ve a very good writer, it just comes off as poor characterization.  (Unless you mean to be unclear, but again, you should be a very good writer before attempting that.)

Needless to say, this is not a very good writer.

Matthew Clairmont had taken the upper hand.

How?  By explaining that he has no particular interest in you and then turning back to his reading, after saying that he didn’t want to keep you from your work?  Oh, yeah, that’s some real upper-hand-ness there.  Careful, next he might leave.

Montblanc Meisterstück mechanical pencil.

Why, book?  Why?

Diana decides to chronicle her morning for us, complete with time stamps.  A deamon shows up at one point and does jack-all nothing.

Sarah always said that one in ten beings was a creature, but in Duke Humfrey’s this morning the creatures outnumbered humans five to one.

…There’s a deamon, a witch, and a vampire.  If the ratio is five to one, does that mean there’s a fraction of a human walking around?  Or are there more creatures around that you’re not telling us about?  Maybe you should take some of the words you’re wasting on the brand of pencil that Matthew is using and spend them on something relevant and useful.

A new guy shows up, and he’s a wizard, and he’s sending bad vibes at Diana that are supposed to be a threat.

this male witch

Wizard or witch, book?  Because if you’re going to be invoking Wicca and the Salem trials, as you unfortunately have, then you should know that ‘witch’ is a gender-neutral term.  There’s no ‘male witch’ unless you’re going to go around also clarifying that women are ‘female witches.’  In this case, it seems to be that ‘male witch’ is supposed to serve as a definition for ‘wizard,’ in which case…what the fuck does that mean?  That male magic users are using a different kind of magic than female ones?  (I had the same problem with the Hogwarts School for Wizardry and Witchcraft.  Is there a difference?  Is it a gendered difference?  Can wizards use witchcraft, and vice-versa?  What’s even the point of having two words for the same thing?)

“Leave me alone. The humans have noticed us,” I said between clenched teeth.

Yes, all that…standing around, sitting quietly, and reading, that sure drew a lot of attention.  ???

Hm, apparently the male is going to be called a witch, despite being introduced as a wizard.  Again, why use that word at all?

Diana continues to act all freaked out and dramatic over the number of creatures in the building, even though none of them have done anything.  Not today, not at any point in the book, so it’s not even like we can assume they’ll do bad things, because we have no precedent for assuming these people are dangerous.  She’s just whining and crying over, as far as we know, nothing. 

Uhg, this book is so bad.

She spends the whole day quietly freaking out at her desk, the heads home early because she just can’t take all these polite creatures that mind their own business.

She decides to go for a run, then explains that she gets…um….

“Adrenaline poisoning,” one of my doctors had called these surges of anxiety that had troubled me since childhood. The doctors explained that, for reasons they could not understand, my body seemed to think it was in a constant state of danger. One of the specialists my aunt consulted explained earnestly that it was a biochemical leftover from hunter-gatherer days. I’d be all right so long as I rid my bloodstream of the adrenaline load by running, just as a frightened ibex would run from a lion.

A medical excuse for being overdramatic. 

As far as I can tell, this isn’t really a thing under that name.  (I’m sure there’s some overactive-stress-panic-something disorder, but it has a different name.)  And that ‘biochemical leftover’ bit just makes it seem even more wishy-washy.  What is he saying, that the ‘fight or flight’ response is now a medical condition that requires exercise to alleviate? 

Also, exercise actually prompts a release of adrenaline, so the whole bit is just pure bullshit. 

And if this really is some sort of unusual saturation of adrenaline, why haven’t we heard about it before now?  Why didn’t she bring it up when she got suddenly scared of the vampire, in order to explain away her instant desire to flee?  Why hasn’t it caused hardship in her life or had any sort of impact?  Why is it only showing up now?  The timing makes it feel less like overactive hormone production and more like she’s just got a problem with vampires and deamons.

So, she goes running, and then she gets out a one-man sized boat and goes rowing.

Rowing was a religion for me, composed of a set of rituals and movements repeated until they became a meditation.

And yet we’re only just now hearing about it.  You’ll go on about how running from danger is some unfathomable ‘holdover’ from the caveman days, you’ll tell us that the only cure for it is running, you’ll detail every last moment of getting ready for your run, but you don’t bother until right now to tell us that running was just a warm-up to rowing, even though it’s a ‘religion’ to you?

When we get pages and pages and pages of backstory at a time, you can’t really come by afterwards and say “oops, here’s more backstory that we didn’t mention before.  Tralalala!”  The whole thing ends up feeling like it was tacked on, made up as it was written, and then the author just didn’t feel like doing any revision.

Matthew shows up to stalk her again, so she pulls her boat over at a pub to confront him.  She demands to know why he’s hanging out with some many creatures, and Matthew shows his prejudiced side by shuttering at the thought of hanging out with them.  (What is a daemon in this world, anyway?)  Then he points out that they’re all following her, and it’s because she read the magic book.

“They’re following you because they believe you’ve found something lost many years ago,” he said reluctantly. “They want it back, and they think you can get it for them.”

Well golly, miss molly, go to the library and check it out, then.  It’s a fucking book, and she turned it in.  Threaten Sean, the reference desk guy.  He’s not only more malleable, he also has the damn book.

Matthew makes some vaguely threatening comments about how she should be on guard with all these dudes out to get her magic book, and also that other guy is back to being a wizard again.  Uhg, it’s like this book was written on a collection of napkins and stitched together at the end.