Reviews with content warning for Emotional abuse - Island Witch

Reviews tagging 'Emotional abuse'

Island Witch by Amanda Jayatissa

7 reviews

arkwen452's review

challenging dark emotional tense slow-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? Yes

3.75

Island Witch is a combination of carrie, exorcist and Nightmare on Elm Street. I am not a big horror person just because the genre can be complex. But the psychological themes that this book provides were evident.

My rating for this book was mostly based on how Amara was manipulated in the book. The signs were all there and I know that due to those around her she was literally living in a reality that she thought she knew but with key elements taken away.

As a reader, it becomes sickening to watch the main character being manipulated, lied to and harmed; if anything it drives home the desire to see the "witch" rumors be proven right.

Yes, Amara is a very naïve young woman. But at the same time, she herself calls out the discrepancies and weird actions and feelings that she is having. But she seems to actively suppress all that information as it means of holding onto the reality that she's known or the entire time in her life. Kinda as if she knows that she let go of that life and knows ideals that, her be the same. I had a lot of mixed feelings around her actions, but mostly due to the very misogynistic and toxic world that she lives in.

If readers are not use to these themes, take your time reading this book.

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kaiyakaiyo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

2.0

i think i catfished myself with the description; i thought i would really like a book touted as similar to Carrie & The Exorcist but grounded in Sri Lankan history/lore. Somehow it was actually the worst book ive read in a hot minute. very much low budget revenge plot scary movie. long review warning

there were some really cool parts: the cultural/temporal setting, the folklore, even the prose, but that all pales in comparison to the extremely bad characterizations and deeply predictable plot points.

Amara is possibly the most shakily written protagonist I’ve ever encountered; on one page, she’s clever and savvy and well-versed in her father’s spiritual work, on the next she struggles to catch even the most blatant of ploys from a literal demon. A girl magically appears EVERY TIME she’s in the woods with intimate knowledge on exactly what Amara was just thinking about & she just… rolls with it? no one else ever knows who she is or looks directly at her (besides the town WITCH) but she doesn’t question it???? but we’re meant to believe she studied demons for years and her dad says he might hand the practice over to her???? she “knows the jungle” but apparently several people were easily tracking her coming and going in said jungle for days without her knowing? It’s like she was only smart & perceptive when the plot required it, and the rest of the time she had 2 brain cells to rub together. It was a real disservice bc she could have been a very compelling lead without every 3rd important detail flying over her head

The other characters are so wooden; the mother is hateful and pathetic in turns, with no real purpose beyond shaming Amara. It would have been more believable if she’d had a single redeeming quality to make Amara’s conflict with her make sense. The dad is just a jar of flaws with legs; the author did so much flashing back to make him appear to be a good dad turned weak, but ultimately it just felt forced. his affair seemed superfluous; there was already plenty reason to shake Amara’s faith in him

Don’t even get me started on Amara and Raam; what could have been a very salient point about coercion and male expectations of sex ended up feeling clunky and forced for plot advancement. He was slimy to the reader from the get go, but even without realizing he was a total cad, Amara at several points in the book makes it clear that her convictions (and learned shame) about sex outweigh her care for Raam’s feelings. She may not have known he was in it for sex (which is fair given her relative social isolation), but she knew the stakes were WAY higher for her than him. As such, her being pressured into that (absolutely brutal) sex scene came out of left field. She also spent whole paragraphs pondering how willing several men she knows, even her father, are to take advantage of women, but the next day we’re supposed to think her being pressured into sex in a semi-public space makes sense??? if that was the case, there should have been more lead up, more clear wavering of her position, more trust placed in Raam. If anything, I expected Amara to be more wary of Raam as the book progressed, as would logically occur when you learn that even the nicest man you know is harming women. Amara hearing that he is further delaying a proposal seems like the sort of thing that would have made her angry and mistrustful, not “agree” to his pressuring? Everyone around her is trying to force her into things she doesn’t agree with, but one more from her bf is fine for some reason? idk i read that scene and was just like? this makes no sense based on her emotional journey to this point? It does make sense that Raam tried to coerce her into sex as he’d been laying that nasty groundwork since his first appearance, but that specific moment and outcome just felt shoved in. She just had a run in with her bully, and is surrounded by half the town at a highly public event? It would have made more sense for this to have happened earlier, when they were alone in the jungle & she didn’t know as much about the men being attacked/wasn’t so concerned with her/her family’s reputation.

Then the pregnancy “reveal”; social isolation or not, you mean to tell me that an 18 year old girl in a society that considered her “old” for being single would think she was pregnant with a guys baby after they had sex 1 day ago? sex being shameful to her family or not, you mean to tell me she had NO concept of how pregnancy works???? It was so ridiculous it made me stop and go “there’s no way she’s THAT sheltered”. I’m not sure why the author thought this scene made sense at all; having her confront him about the engagement after he lied about proposing to her in 3 months seemed like enough fuel to advance the plot without such a glaring gap in her knowledge. the attempted assault also felt gratuitous given the point already made by his coercion

Overall the second half of this book just took a turn for the ridiculous; Amara stopped feeling like a person and more like a vessel for plot events, and the plot itself just fizzled out. By the end i was just rooting for half the town to die, and looking at the remaining pages to see how likely that was. Would not recommend

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a_fret_argent's review against another edition

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sad tense slow-paced

Loveable characters? No

2.0

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wchereads's review

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2.0

This was really, really frustrating to read and would've hit harder as a novella

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owlmanda's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

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

3.75

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eusteph's review against another edition

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mysterious medium-paced

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

3.75

Welp, I really thought this was going to be a 5 star book.

Here's how this book went:

0-43% - solid 4 star
43-95% - ~3 stars
95-100% - 5 stars

If the math I just came up with mentally is correct, this would make the book a ~3.75 star book.

I really liked the concept of this book and also the fact that it was set in a location that we seldom see in popular western fiction. However, I think this book should have been marketed as a YA thriller of sorts. The protagonist exhibits all the traits of a YA protagonist, as annoying as they can be, and I didn't particularly find her likable. The last portion of this book was fantastic. Too bad the author didn't keep the same energy throughout the rest of the story.

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smittenforfiction's review

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense 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? It's complicated

5.0

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