Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - The Witchery

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msradiosilence's review

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.5

TLDR; 3.5 rating, I love sapphics, I love Black witches, and I’m just…a lil disappointed.

Content warnings at the bottom. :)

The premise for this book sounded delicious. Magic school? A curse? Black witches?? Yes please! And then I get to the first chapter and I just feel like we have skipped several parts. Isabelle skips over Logan actually coming to the school and the months she’s been taking classes and drops you right into the story and it’s missing some key elements. A little bit is explained, but the feeling of missing pieces never leaves.

I love a good magic system, and one of my favorites is in Rainbow Rowell’s Simon Snow trilogy. This book seemed to have a very similar magic premise? I’m not sure, because it’s never really explained. From what I understand, there’s spell phrases that everyone learns and then when you completely understand them, you can change the words to make the spell work better with your personal magic. Which is very cool, except once again we’re not really told any of this. And since the Red Three keeps saying Logan’s proxy-ness breaks all the magic rules they have to follow, it would be very helpful to know the rules the Red Three have to follow, ya know?

I think it boils down to wanting more details as a whole. Balancing six POVs (I’ll get to that in a minute) means that there are a lot of descriptions that would round out the characters, the setting, the magic, everything, is sacrificed in favor of bouncing between Trent, Matthew, Jailah, Iris, Thalia, and Logan. It took me almost the entire book to realize this wasn’t like Harry Potter and the whole world is aware of witches. Thalia’s storyline suddenly made a lot more sense.

Six POVs is so much to juggle, and the book probably would’ve benefitted greatly from following three, or just being an omniscient narrator instead of omniscient about one person at a time. The POVs aren’t in first person. It took a lot away from the story, and I really think the plot and the details could’ve benefitted greatly from cutting down or cutting out POVs.

Also, by the end, I wanted to bop Logan on the head. She was incredibly selfish, incredibly naive, and she deserves a bop.

Because I do plan on reading the sequel (out in Sept 2023), I do have several questions not plot related I need answered:

How exactly does the school work?
How does magic work, exactly? Be specific, please.
Why do Thalia and Lilly have familiars but not anyone else?
Is there a limit to the magic witches can perform? How do they know the limit? Is there a way to increase the limit?
Does everyone have a Pull? If they don’t, what happens? Are people with Pulls rare?
What exactly do witches as a group do out in the rest of the world? How has the world changed from what we know irl?
Are tethers a thing everyone has? Is it rare? How often are witches and mundanes tethers? What does it entail for a witch and a mundane to be tethered?

Please I have so many more, I would just love a lore dump or something.

Once I articulated my main problems with the book, I could push them aside (for the most part) and enjoy what I was reading, even if I was still confused, hence the three stars. There is a solid plot underneath, if we wanna go bare bones. Powerful witches willing to do dubious magic to save their school. None of them are all good, they’re not all bad, and I like that.

Rating: 3.5

Would I recommend? A tentative yes, but this is one the reader just kinda has to push through.

Content warnings: Injury/Injury detail, Racism, Toxic relationship, Violence, Hate crime, Blood, Body horror, Death of parent, Grief, Murder, Toxic friendship, Animal death, Child abuse, Cursing, Alcohol, Religious bigotry, Torture, Bullying, Car accident, Death, Emotional abuse, and Gore

Content Warnings

bookish_afrolatina's review

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dark mysterious fast-paced

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

3.5

I had high hopes for this book. The cover is gorgeous and I was hype for a witchy book with BIPOC leads taking place in Florida? I rarely see my home state featured in cool stuff like this.

Unfortunately, I had a hard time connecting with this novel because there were too many POVs. Or maybe it just felt that way when I listened to the audiobook. The plot had so many directions that adding the multiple POVs made me feel lost sometimes. The narrator for the audiobook also didn’t do a good job with the Southern and British accents. That made me even less into the book.

As I’ve seen many other folks say, Logan annoyed me multiple times, but the ending was meant to explain that.

At any rate, it was a good book.

Content Warnings