That evening Matthew picks her up for yoga. 

“Are you smelling me?” After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn’t want him to have.

“Don’t tempt me,” he murmured, shutting me inside. The hair on my neck rose slightly as the implication of his words sank in.

What implications?  Is he implying that he’s going to eat her?  That she’s sending out ‘eat me’ vibes?  ‘Sex me’ vibes?  Is she tempting him by smelling good or by telling him to stop smelling her?  Because, really, all those options are terrible, and I’d like to know exactly which way I’m going to hate you today, book.

When we left to change for yoga, Miriam had remained to make sure we weren’t followed by a train of daemons—or worse.

…what’s worse than a daemon?  You’ve already made a fucking hierarchy of creatures and put daemons at the bottom simply because they’re ‘smart,’ so what do you count as ‘or worse’?

“Then relax. I’m not kidnapping you. It can be pleasant to let someone else take charge.

Can being the operative word.  Because it can also be an unpleasant experience, especially when in a car with a relative stranger who wants to also eat you.  Diana is here saying she wants to know where they’re going and expressing discomfort at heading to an unfamiliar part of town, and Matthew responds with ‘stop feeling the way you’re feeling and feel how I want you to instead.’

Ass.

“Stop thinking and listen,” he commanded.

I…just…do I even have to say anything?

Diana just shrugs off his assery as if it’s nothing to get offended over and sits quietly until they arrive.  Matthew does yoga in a fancy old Tudor manor house which is, I assure you, several pages worth of fancy and impressive.

The class is full of other creatures.

“Sorry,” Clairmont said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come if I told you—and it really is the best class in Oxford.”

So, let’s recap.  Matthew knew she wouldn’t want to come if she knew the nature of the class.  He figured that she should come anyway – to a yoga class mind you, not something important – so he intentionally withheld information in order to manipulate her into doing something he knew she wouldn’t want to do.

Oh yeah, so sexy. 

Oh good lord, the text takes us through almost every move in the yoga class.  Really.  Because reading about downward dog is just so fascinating, isn’t it?  She even describes the positions to us. 

Book, stop it.  Anyone who cares about yoga already knows, anyone who doesn’t isn’t going to spontaneously care just because you’re shoving in all these extra words.

Also, Matthew is vaguely awesome.  Diana takes time out of her descriptions of yoga to explain to us that Matthew is just so great and good at all this, and also pretty, and also she can’t stop staring at him, and I really don’t care because he’s an inconsiderate jerk.

Matthew and Diana stay after class to talk to the teacher, though I’ve no idea why and Diana doesn’t bother to wonder or explain.

“I was afraid Diana wouldn’t come. And I thought she’d like it, if she gave it a chance.”

Look, we really need to talk about this. 

You can’t tell another person what to do.  It’s not nice.  Now, that can be frustrating a lot.  It’s true.  Perhaps you know that the other person would have fun, if only they would try this one thing, but they’re stubborn and won’t do it.  You want them to have fun, because you like them and want them to be happy, yes?  But when they stay stuck in their ruts, when you know they could be happier than they are now, that frustrates you.

Get the fuck over it.  Yes, it’s frustrating to want to do good and be stuck unable to.  Lots of things in life are frustrating.  Here’s the thing: it’s not your job to tell someone else how to be happy.  Full stop.  You can suggest.  You can argue.  You can make your well-reasoned points.  You can leave an open invitation.  But you cannot take control of another person’s life just because you think you know best.  It’s not your life, you’re not living it, and you don’t get to make that person’s decisions.  No matter what excuse you think you have, it’s still not your life.  You do not get to decide what’s best for another person, or what will make them happy, or how to go about achieving that happiness.  It’s not your responsibility or your right to do that.  If someone else makes the decision to be stuck in a rut, only doing safe and boring hobbies, they are allowed to do that.  If you think it’s frustrating to see that, tough cookies.  Advise if you want, that’s fine.  If they ask you for help, by all means, do that, too.  But don’t make decisions about another person’s happiness.

And don’t allow other people to make decisions about your happiness.

The fact that Diana did like the class does not change the fact that Matthew meddled in her life and made her decisions for her.  He still didn’t have permission to do that.

Okay, back to the story.  The house in question is Matthew’s, and it was built in the mid 1500’s, so he’s at least that old.  He only lives there on the weekends.  They go to a kitchen, have tea, and blather on about even more pointless backstory.  Or stories.  Seriously, there’s useless details bursting at the seams in this book.  Then they talk about how their mixed yoga class is just so awesome and progressive and get-along-y and they’re just tearing down the walls of prejudice one table pose at a time.  Or something, I don’t even know, because it’s a fucking yoga class.  And on top of that, we don’t even know enough about the world to know what significance it has.  Maybe this is no more than one class worth of tolerant people.  Maybe it’s actually 90% of the magical population of Oxford.  Maybe there’s no governing body to keep the races separate or subjugated, so convincing people to be nice is all that’s needed.  Or maybe there is, and…then what?  Are the people in this class important to that body, or easily overlooked?  We’ll never know, because this book is shit!

Diana is embarrassed to have been caught doing magic, and tells him she wishes she’d never found the book because she just wants to be normal.  Then she clarifies for the reader that she means not full of ’death and danger and the fear of being discovered.’  How does Matthew counter?  With that old platitude about how there is no normal because we’re all such super special snowflakes.

It’s such a shallow sentiment.  Might as well look at someone who lost two legs, or who has disfiguring scars, or has a disability that makes them unemployable, and then say “yeah, but I wear glasses, so there’s no such thing as normal, right?”  Bullshit.  There’s no one, single, mannequin-esque base that everyone has to perfectly adhere to, but to say that there’s no such thing as normalcy is an incredibly simplistic and dismissive view.  Maybe you can tell it to teenagers who are flipping out because they got a zit, fine.  But to a grown woman who’s currently being stalked by magical creatures and would like to just not be stalked by magical creatures?  Yeah, there is such a thing as normal to her.

Matthew tries to tell her she can’t ignore her magic, because it ain’t going away.  Then he says that history bears him out, because scientists tried to ignore magic but magic didn’t go away.  He says Newton was brilliant because he dabbled in alchemy, rather than ignore the mystical side of nature.

Well, okay genius, if magic is real and made Newton brilliant, what the fuck did he do with it?  Huh?  Got an answer?  You can tell me something.  It’s a fantasy book; I’ll roll with an alternate history.  But fucking tell me something.  Because in the only history I currently have to work with, Newton’s alchemy was nothing more than some crackpot shit that didn’t amount to anything.

“[Robert Hooke] was only a human, and he ruined his life trying to resist the lure of magic.

…Really, what the fuck is wrong with you, book?  Do you think I don’t have access to wikipedia?  He ruined his life because he was a jealous and paranoid old coot.  And even then, ‘ruined’ is subjective.

Really, the book is acting like what we know of history hasn’t changed, and yet somehow still supports the idea that magic is real.  They haven’t changed Hooke’s history in the least, they’re just randomly claiming that ~*~*~somehow~*~*~ Hooke was destroyed by avoiding magic.

And…really, does that mean that all humans that don’t dabble in spells are doomed to a life of ruination?  What is going on here and why are you such a fucking mess, book?

Matthew continues to try and tell her that avoiding magic is a mistake, Diana doesn’t listen, and in the end he drives her home.