Everyone sits around and tosses out ideas about what the letter and book page could possibly mean.  This really, honestly feels like it should be the start of a novel, not something that pops up at nearly the end.  This is laying groundwork for some rising action at a point where we should be getting into the meat of a mystery and have the answers in sight.  (Of course, if we’re talking shoulds, we should be done with the novel, because there has not been 35 chapters of anything worth reading so far.  Some editor should have cut out vast swaths of that middle section and spared us all the pointless side trip to France.)

Diana’s father could time travel.  And since Diana has every single power ever known ever, I’m guessing she can, too.  Wonderful.

The speculation is really boring, since they seem to be focusing on such things as “handwriting” and “why would they include encouraging quotes, wow, so weird that my parents wanted to encourage me as I set out on this difficult journey, I wonder if it has symbolick meaning?!?!?!?!?”

They determine that Diana’s father put the spell on the magic book, and I guess he time traveled to do it since the spell was supposedly put on it 150 years ago.  He spelled it so that only Diana could call it, and apparently the parameters on the spell were pretty iffy, since she could call it the first time on accident and couldn’t the second time on purpose.

Remember, your parents bound your magic so that your power couldn’t be forced from you. The spell on the manuscript was no different.”

Just…this whole thing will never cease to annoy me.  Sure, no one else can force magic out of Diana, but at the same time, she can’t do that either!  She has to just stumble around, vaguely wishing for things and then hoping that she wished right.

Diana can ‘timewalk’ as well, and she could do it when she was three, by accident, with no consequences, when her father had to put it oddles of effort and precautions.  Because she’s special, damnit!  Anyway, it seems that the letter from her parents implies that she’ll have to time travel in order to get that book, but no one wants her to do it because it’s dangerous.  Assuming that’s what her parents even meant anyway, since everyone is just guessing.

…This is a magic note sent by magic parents to their magic daughter and held in keeping by a magic house and delivered via magic.  Why couldn’t they just plainly state what they meant?  Why the vague comments and the mysterious quotes and all the mystery?

I see this a lot and it never fails to piss me off.  The note is mysterious because that’s the trope, end of story.  It’s the same reason that creatures stay hidden in this book and that vampires are all wealthy.  That’s just ‘the way things are done,’ as if there’s something intrinsic to vampires, magical societies, and notes from dead parents that just require these things.  Except, in fact, there’s not.  I mean, it’s certainly possible to have secret communities and rich characters and vague letters, but you really shouldn’t be starting from the blank assumption that these things just are, because there’s nothing automatic about any of those things.

But…apparently we need a sudden change in topic, so Diana goes to make some tea.  It’s the tea that Marthe taught her how to make, and Diana’s aunts inform her that it’s actually a type of contraceptive.  …even though Matthew is a vampire, and thus impotent.  So…

First of all, Marthe didn’t tell her what the tea does, she just said “it’s healthy for you, drink some every day.”  She’s limiting Diana’s reproductive rights without her knowledge.  SHE’S TRYING TO TAKE CONTROL OF DIANA’S BODY AND HER RIGHTS TO DECIDE IF SHE WANTS CHILDREN OR NOT.  We’re back into horror novel territory.

Second, please tell me there’s no magic sparkle half-vampire baby in this book as well.  Please.

At least Diana dumps the tea out when she finds out what it is, although she does so because she thinks it’s unnecessary, not because she thinks it’s horrible that someone tried to take away her rights through trickery. 

Another pointless change in subject!  Diana and Matthew go outside and make out while deciding to still not have sex yet.  Riveting. 

And then it’s on to pointless talking about vampire diets and how Em doesn’t want Sarah to ’embarrass’ her once Marcus shows up.  Didn’t we just recently have a magic note telling Diana to (maybe) magically time travel and also there’s supposedly a ‘Congregation’ of people out to get her and all sorts of shit?  Yeah?  Then what’s with all the domestic chatter?  This shit is not interesting!

Sarah brings out the Bishop family grimoire, and we get even more backstory.  Because I know you guys were missing that, weren’t you?  Oh, and more bullshit about witch trials.

“Well, the tension between what science promised and what their common sense told them was true resulted in the deaths of hundreds of witches.”

What the fuck even is this?  What is it trying to say?  That people were actually seeing real magic, and that scared them, because it didn’t fit with science?

Book, do you know what science is?  Because it’s not some weird set of beliefs that got plunked down and declared law and everything outside it was burned.  The magic we’ve seen in this book, frankly, would fit just fine with science.  Especially with Renaissance-era science.  People would see witches doing magic and say “I WANT TO EXPERIMENT AND SEE HOW THAT HAPPEND” and then they’d do just that and it would be declared science.  In fact, most of the reason that people were afraid of ‘witchcraft’ in that time was because it was never seen or explainable.  Real magic would not fit that bill, if it had existed at the time.

It would be one thing if this book had, like, a Lord of the Rings-esque magic system, where things just sort of happen and are pretty mysterious and ancient and unexplained.  But at the point where you have grimoires full of spells and rituals, at the point where you can DNA test for magic, that is not the point where you can keep the standard “people are afraid of the unexplainable magic” witch hunts.  It’s no longer unexplainable.

Matthew and Sarah wander off to do magic to the manuscript page, and then Marcus and Miriam show up.  Then everyone sits around and chitchats some more, because this book hates me.  I really think it’s just actively trying to piss me off now.  There’s no way for an author to believe that someone would actually be interested in reading about the minutia of vampires drinking tea for 500 fucking pages.  It would count as an amusing aside or single scene in a better paced book, but for 500 fucking pages?

They pull out the manuscript page and agree that it really is a picture of Diana and Matthew getting married, somehow.  Then Miriam says that after marriage comes conception.  Dun, dun, dun.