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A review by starryeyedenigma
The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
4.0
A grand finale to a grand series. Finally, after years and hours of listening to the audiobook, I'm glad I was able to finish the series. I liked the final book much more than the second one. But my favorite will still be the first book of the series, because of the fact that there were a lot of unknowns in the first book, and while the final book does provide some answers, I didn't find them all satisfactory.
What I loved about this series was the author's genius in writing a story set in fantasy and mythical creatures such as vampires, witches and demons, but actually talking about human issues such as segregation on the basis of race and that our scientific studies say that we all belong to the same family in the end. There is so much description on DNA analysis carried out by vampires, about genome studies (I am no scientist and these are all terms I picked up from the book). In the second book, the author probably fed in her desire of writing about history and that was again ingenious in how she takes real historic figures and adds to their stories in this fantasy story!
I was finally happy with Diana's character arc and actually thought that she grows the most in the entire series. But I was disappointed with the stagnation of Mathew's character, or maybe I missed something about his growth that other readers would have seen or felt. To me, he felt as one dimensional as he had from the start. The other thing that I still didn't buy, was Mathew and Diana's chemistry or the reason why they mated/fell so deeply in love with each other. Little is written about why they fall in love and from the first book itself, its just given to us that well, they fall madly in love with each other :)
The other characters I liked reading about were Marcus, Isabelle and Gallowglass. And I was sad about that last bit that we are told about in the final book. I wish the author hadn't done that, and if she had, I wish he had found some closure. But, again, that's just my thoughts on it :)
Overall, a great and well thought out and really descriptive series with the last book packing in a lot of action, and gory details to satisfy my tastes.
What I loved about this series was the author's genius in writing a story set in fantasy and mythical creatures such as vampires, witches and demons, but actually talking about human issues such as segregation on the basis of race and that our scientific studies say that we all belong to the same family in the end. There is so much description on DNA analysis carried out by vampires, about genome studies (I am no scientist and these are all terms I picked up from the book). In the second book, the author probably fed in her desire of writing about history and that was again ingenious in how she takes real historic figures and adds to their stories in this fantasy story!
I was finally happy with Diana's character arc and actually thought that she grows the most in the entire series. But I was disappointed with the stagnation of Mathew's character, or maybe I missed something about his growth that other readers would have seen or felt. To me, he felt as one dimensional as he had from the start. The other thing that I still didn't buy, was Mathew and Diana's chemistry or the reason why they mated/fell so deeply in love with each other. Little is written about why they fall in love and from the first book itself, its just given to us that well, they fall madly in love with each other :)
The other characters I liked reading about were Marcus, Isabelle and Gallowglass. And I was sad about that last bit that we are told about in the final book. I wish the author hadn't done that, and if she had, I wish he had found some closure. But, again, that's just my thoughts on it :)
Overall, a great and well thought out and really descriptive series with the last book packing in a lot of action, and gory details to satisfy my tastes.