Shadow of Night by Deborah HarknessHarkness bit off a lot here with this second venture in the trilogy--and only some of it was adequately chewed. I'm a (music) historian, and even I began to tire of Elizabethan London. I missed the characters from the first book, to whom I had just established a connection in the last quarter of that novel. That said, there are places in this book where Harkness's talents as an author shine.
While there are moments that are a bit obvious in terms of historical placement, Harkness is subtle (at least initially) in illuminating the treatment of women in the sixteenth century. Any woman will recognize the feeling of being talked about as if we aren't standing there in the room, and Harkness works this into the narrative quite beautifully. At some point it becomes necessary to be a bit more overt as Diana has to assert her twenty-first century self into the Renaissance, but I appreciated that Harkness did not hit us over the head with it at the outset.
There is an uneven characterization for some of the leading players throughout the book and this applies to both wholly fictitious characters and those based on historical figures. Like Diana, the reader is feeling surrounded by threads that she must constantly monitor lest they tie themselves in knots. In A Discovery of Witches, the characters didn't really move me until the last third of the book. This second installment has too many characters so that there is very little time to care or form an attachment to any of them--I was left feeling a lack of emotional investment when it came to the many "goodbyes" in the book.
The time in England and Prague could have been reduced in length, and the end of the book most definitely sets you up to read the third part of the trilogy. There's no fault in that, of course, and I'm happy to report that my overall impression of the book was positive and I will eagerly read The Book of Life.
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