"Time's Convert" by Deborah Harkness

Marcus and Phoebe, after navigating the tumultuous process of getting the family’s blessing for their relationship, are getting married. They want to do it the traditional way, so Phoebe has decided to become a vampire, so they can spend eternity in each other’s arms. While there are risks with becoming a vampire, Phoebe is getting help from the entire De Clermont family to ensure she can transition as safely as possible to the realm of the undead. Still, there are challenges to be overcome with the move, and it does little to ease Diana’s mind to know that while Marcus is worried over Phoebe, Diana and Matthew’s children are developing unusual powers all their own.

Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness is a continuation of the All Souls Trilogy, which delves deeper into the experience of becoming a vampire than some of the other books Harkness has written. It’s a novel that’s tightly focused on Marcus and Phoebe rather than the De Clermonts broadly, and Harkness uses this structure to flip back and forth between Marcus’s life before he was turned into a vampire and Phoebe’s current experience of that. The story is a bit light on plot compared to its predecessors, but it offers far more explanation for why vampires behave the way they do and how they come to be, which, when taken with the larger story, provides its own fascinating exploration of the world Harkness has constructed. Given that there’s another book in the series, Time’s Convert may be setting up something for the next chapter of the De Clermont story.

For readers, the book may be a bit challenging to enjoy if you’re accustomed to novels that are driven by traditional plot lines, because reading it feels more like an interregnum than a true continuation of the All Souls Trilogy story. However, readers who have read the other books and are attracted to Harkness’s use of historical detail would find it enjoyable as it helps flesh out the world of creatures that she began in A Discovery of Witches. It may offer some enjoyment for those looking for a different kind of romance, but it leans more into the realm of readers that enjoy academic exercises in their story than it does into the realm of mainstream romance readers.

For writers, Time’s Convert offers a unique take on how to flesh out a story’s world-building elements. The structure of the novel may not be ideal for some audiences, but it does provide an in-depth exploration of what it takes to create a mythology around a character type and then use it to gently expand the boundaries of the possible without coming across as a technical academic text. The specific focus on two characters as two ends of the spectrum lends weight to the complex emotions and experiences of the other characters without detracting from the main two. Writers looking for ways to create new worlds would likely benefit from reading Harkness’s fourth installment of the All Souls series because of this example she sets, even if it should be layered in with additional readings to fully conceive of how to execute it while including enough plot to keep the audience interested.

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