Reviews with content warning for Slavery - Boszorkánykirály

Reviews tagging 'Slavery'

Boszorkánykirály by Martha Wells

38 reviews

mes0pelagic_fan's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

I loved this book! I was instantly hooked and fell in love with the main cast of characters. I think my only qualms with this book are related to pacing-- I flew through this book and by the time I was 90% of the way through I wanted to shake the audiobook to see if a second half would magically fall out.

Once we hit the Summer Halls in the present timeline, I was like .. woah. hold the phone. The way things went with Ramad so quickly I just felt like I'd gotten whiplash (I was kind of rooting for him and then was sad when he ended up sucking so unexpectedly-- not sure if I missed the clues about him being a spy but I felt like I must have, or they just weren't there).

I honestly think the past timeline was a bit more coherent, but that might just be because the situation was more clearly laid out and the stakes were higher; the mystery of the present timeline kind of flew past me. I was also obsessed with the effortless queerness of this book from the get-go;

especially with Kai's body hopping/general life (and the other demon's reactions!).

There were also a lot of themes/plot threads I wish were explored more, but there just wasnt time

(the self-harm to magic thing was never really addressed, same with the hierarchs' potential return, and Kai's whole under-earth family, along with a bunch of other stuff I wanted to dig into)

. There is definitely plenty of room left in this world for more adventures. This book isn't perfect, but was delightful to read (especially after dnf-ing a few books for taking sooooo long to pick up any meaningful threads!)

Content Warnings

wardenred's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

“Why is everyone so afraid of demons?”

It's curious how each individual aspect of this book is pretty much exactly up my alley, but the whole they form left me vaguely unsatisfied. The beginning hooked me pretty hard: a classic in media res opening that felt like starting a new tv show with the first episode of season two; a soul-sucking, body-snatching demon trying to figure out who betrayed him and where his companions went; a few cool subversions of minor fantasy tropes along the way; evocative descriptions; immersive vibes. For the first quarter of the book or so, I genuinely enjoyed how the flashback storyline intermeshed with the plot in the present time. There were plenty of interesting, fleshed out characters with a complex web of relationships between them and smart, quippy moments of dialogue.

However, the deeper I went into the story, the harder it was to sustain that immersion. The world continued to be interesting and cleverly built. The characters remained complex and compelling, in theory. In practice, I was finding harder and harder to connect to them, possibly because of the two different arcs (the past and the present) running alongside each other. I kept waiting for certain gaps between the two storylines to be filled, but they never quite went there, and there were a couple of plot threads that felt practically abandoned, even though technically, the events that needed to happen to wrap them up did happen. The emotional payoff, however, just wasn't present, as if something important was missing each time between the set-up and the conclusion.

Upon some thinking, I suspect that part of my dissatisfaction comes from not forming expectations correctly. I'm not even sure what I expected, exactly, but I just thought I'd be more engaged with Kai in the present storyline. But for the most part in the present, he's the sort of character who's already peaked and now is figuring out where to get the will to go on. It doesn't help that the present-time plot is fairly straightforward to the point that it's barely enough to sustain a novel. The depth comes from the various side characters who, by virtue of being side characters, don't get to take the center stage, and from the storyline that unfolds in the flashbacks—and has the ingrained flaw of the reader knowing how it ends before it even begins.

This is definitely the kind of story that's focused on the journey above the destination, and I'm normally all for it. But the further I read, the more disconnected I felt from that journey, and I still struggle to formulate why. So far, my best guess is that the things that would hook me the most into the characters' stories and inner worlds were glossed over or kept silent. There were some moments that really stuck with me: Ziede and Kai's moment of "how it started, how it's going" reminiscence, or that instance when Kai heard of how his relationship with Bashasa was perceived from the outside and reflected on how it truly was in that regard, or Kai's interaction with his mother. All of those exchanges were ripe with emotional weight and history that I longed to see the story properly delve into. Instead, those things that would have truly hooked me were stuck existing between the lines. In general, I just think that for my taste, too much was missing/assumed about the character and relationship development.

I did enjoy a lot of narrative threads here, and even more so the worldbuilding. In particular, I loved the themes of what happens to the world after it gets saved/rebuilt, the post-revolution instability, and the anti-imperial ideas. I also, being me, wholeheartedly appreciated how queernormative this setting is, and I found Wells's take on demons super refreshing. While the magic system and some other aspects of the worldbuilding had me confused for a long time, I felt like the key points came together quite naturally by the end and I definitely prefer this sort of organic immersion to infodumps. And I'll be definitely thinking more about the dual narrative structure here and all the ways it did and didn't work for me in the coming days.

Content Warnings

norspider's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Definitely building toward something!

Witch King is full of multidimensional characters in a fleshed-out world. The magic system is unique and leads to several powerful characters. There is also a great amount care given to under-represented people.

But there's no conclusion! This is obviously meant to be the beginning of a series, and there's nothing wrong with that. But books, all books in any series, should still have a complete narrative in themselves. Witch King fails in this regard. That said, it does a wonderful job introducing this world, and I will absolutely continue this adventure.

Content Warnings

pvp_niki's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Content Warnings

kkulhannie's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

skudiklier's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

The only Martha Wells I've read is the Murderbot series, and in a lot of ways this was quite different from that, so I really didn't know what I was getting myself into. And honestly there was a period in the beginning where I was worried I wouldn't like the book and thought about DNFing. But I'm glad I stuck with it because in the end I really enjoyed it.

You just sort of land in the middle of things without a lot of context in the beginning, so it can be hard to follow, especially with the time jumps. But I think it all came together really well and I cared about the characters and was engaged in the story. That said, I do think if I hadn't been reading an audiobook, I would have struggled more. It probably would have taken me a lot longer to read it.

All in all I'd definitely recommend this to anyone interested, especially if you like Wells's writing or if you like fantasy more broadly. However, if you're just looking for more Murderbot, you might be disappointed. I wasn't though, and I'm glad I read it.

Content Warnings

piendorabox's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A bit hard to get into, but I grew to care for the characters that when the book ended I was sad it was a standalone. Overall it felt like watching 5 episodes of the 6th season (there are 9 seasons overall) of a very obscure tv series that isn't available on any streaming platform, and those 5 episodes are all you could find, and you could only get vague ideas of what came before from flashback scenes and was completely in the dark about what came after, but you enjoyed the watching experience nonetheless even though it was nothing like you'd ever had before. A good book. Will definitely check out Martha Wells' other works later.

Content Warnings

briely's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.75

Content Warnings

roseleebooks's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I first discovered Martha Wells through her book The Wizard Hunters. Since then I've hoped she would return to fantasy writing as that series was so beautifully written and her characters so likeably flawed. This book gave me the same feeling of discovering a world and characters that would stay with me long after I finished reading.

The story centers on Kai, a demon who has built a family in the world above the Underearth. The narrative includes both the present - in which Kai and his close friend Zeide wake up in an underwater prison - and the past when Kai first met Zeide, Tahren, and Bashasa. It's ultimately a book about keeping promises to those we love, told via a cleverly paced journey through a well-crafted world. I appreciate that Wells doesn't spend excessive time on explanations that wouldn't fit with the character's experience of the world. As a reader it takes a little more attention and intuiting but helps the story flow more smoothly.

My only wish for this book was that there was more of it. I would love another novel in the same world that followed some of the other characters introduced here. Regardless, this book is fantastic as a stand alone and will be on my reread list along with Wells' Ile-rien series.

Content Warnings

scrubsandbooks's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I thoroughly enjoyed this! This wasn't an easy book to get into. I learned pretty quickly that I had to keep tabbed the list of names and times and play really close attention to everything and everyone because Martha Wells spins a complex world in these pages and among two separate timelines that initially felt like they would be hard to follow. But the action picked up fairly quickly and you were drawn right into the conflict of the main character and his friends who have been taken captive and are trying to piece their found family and life back together to figure out how the heck it even happened.

This book felt more like an introduction to this world and to the political turmoil that is likely to play a huge role in the main character's future. While I don't see an indication on storygraph that it would be part of a series, the ending does set up a sort of an opening for a sequel and I am hoping it is because while a lot happens, it is still set up to read like a beginning of something bigger than what was in this book.

It is a pretty heavy info-packed book and it might take some tries to get into but when I stuck to it, I found the characters to be a whole mood ("I don't need rest, I'm fueled by spite"). Kai is straight up Le Tired, and Ziede wants to find her wife -- a relationship, by the way, that you get to see blossom in almost a mini arc between the two weaving timelines. The one is definitely worth a reread and I see it approaching the same level of "epic fantasy" as a lot of great ones published in the past.

Content Warnings

More...