Shadow of Night and The Book of Life are books two and three, respectively in the All Souls Trilogy. The trilogy itself is a fun adventure story, starring a woman, Diana Bishop. She’s a researcher and witch who has stumbled upon a book about the history of all of three creature types: demon, vampire, and witch. The book goes back into the library at Oxford at the beginning of the the first book in the trilogy, and the remaining books are dedicated to getting back.
There are countless characters and subplots and lots of world building details. The author is a historian, so all of that information rings true and is told with so much affection that you can’t help but also be drawn into that affection. But the story is longer than it should have been with more characters than there needed to be – I wish it had been tighter and concise.
But then it might have lost its soul – I wrote that the first book was a melodrama, and it was. The second and third books are too. Everything is heightened, and it’s not just the life and death of the characters, it’s the lives and deaths of the entirety of creature-hood. The shagginess of the tale might be a feature, not a bug. It’s a better melodrama because of the over-elaboration and too many characters. It would have lost its soap opera-ness without them.
The trilogy is fun and makes for a good light read when you have plenty of time for it. I both started and ended this trilogy on different vacations and that was the right time to read it.