Talk:A Discovery of Witches (book)/@comment-30796761-20170729014828

I must express my gratitude for the very thorough and detailed recaps provided by this site.

At last, I just got my hands on 'The Book of Life' but now it's been more than a year since I'd read the first two and my copies are missing. I haven't seen them since before we moved into this house in 2014 I believe it was.

My mom seems to believe they're still around but the problem is, our storage situation is a colossal mess. I have two whole boxes of stuff that recently went missing after I moved them from my bedroom to the garage. So it could be a while before I can even begin to search and until I do I am reluctant to purchase new copies.

The recaps here (this one and the one for 'Shadow of Night') have restored my memory a pretty sufficient amount. I feel more like I can read 'The Book of Life' now.

Forgive me, because I'm a bit detail/wording anal, I must comment on one statement:

" Marcus says that some significant magical abilities of Diana's appear to have been inherited from her twin brother who likely was miscarried early in Diana's mother's pregnancy with her.  " 

It wasn't a miscarriage, per say. It's a considerably common phenomenon that occurs in at least a quarter of multiple fetus pregnancies called Vanishing Twin Syndrome.

VTS is when one fetus in a multiple fetus pregnancy absorbs one or more of it's weaker peers. Generally,  it occurs in the first trimester before the mother is aware that she'd ever carried the vanished fetus if she even she was even aware of the pregnancy itself. The cause is currently unknown.

In this case, Diana was the stronger fetus and absorbed her twin brother. Hence his DNA being present in her hair sample and how she possesses his powers including the one that shaped a huge chunk of the whole trilogy, timewalking.

This is at least one basis of Diana being more powerful than average. She possesses a whole nother witch's arsenal.