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A review by sreddous
The Lost Witch by Paige Crutcher
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
Overall, this book has some cool ideas and potential worldbuilding, but unfortunately, the plot is not organized in a way that brings out those strengths.
I think the risks with a "protagonist lost their memories" story paired with a third-person narrator is that if the protagonist doesn't know what's going on and doesn't know what the stakes and tension we're building up to is, the reader might not either, and that's the feeling I got from this book. I found myself confused pretty often and while sometimes that can be interesting (since we're 'as confused as the main character is'), most of the time I found it frustrating. There's some good action here -- it was cool to fight the soul-eating demons but that was just one quick scene where no bad consequences or lessons learned really happened. I feel like I'm not really "watching Brigid learn skills and hone her magic," I feel like people are just snarking at each other until it's suddenly time for Brigid to remember something, which was pretty hard to get into the flow of as a plot. I feel like a lot of the otherwise-cool powers and lore just feel.... randomly-applied.
Knightly is sometimes totally devoted to Brigid, sometimes not, so I found his interactions with Brigid to be annoying and not-emotionally-built-up-to. Dove is an off-screen prop, not a real person. Ophelia and Finola have cute personalities, but I feel like they only helped contribute to the tone-clashing -- we get inserts of description-less, dialogue-only podcast episodes from them in the middle of action scenes, which snapped me out of following the scary action.
This book has some cool ideas overall, but in my opinion it really needs to have its scenes rearranged and maybe should even be told from first-person perspective. As-is, it's not easy to connect with.
I think the risks with a "protagonist lost their memories" story paired with a third-person narrator is that if the protagonist doesn't know what's going on and doesn't know what the stakes and tension we're building up to is, the reader might not either, and that's the feeling I got from this book. I found myself confused pretty often and while sometimes that can be interesting (since we're 'as confused as the main character is'), most of the time I found it frustrating. There's some good action here -- it was cool to fight the soul-eating demons but that was just one quick scene where no bad consequences or lessons learned really happened. I feel like I'm not really "watching Brigid learn skills and hone her magic," I feel like people are just snarking at each other until it's suddenly time for Brigid to remember something, which was pretty hard to get into the flow of as a plot. I feel like a lot of the otherwise-cool powers and lore just feel.... randomly-applied.
Knightly is sometimes totally devoted to Brigid, sometimes not, so I found his interactions with Brigid to be annoying and not-emotionally-built-up-to. Dove is an off-screen prop, not a real person. Ophelia and Finola have cute personalities, but I feel like they only helped contribute to the tone-clashing -- we get inserts of description-less, dialogue-only podcast episodes from them in the middle of action scenes, which snapped me out of following the scary action.
This book has some cool ideas overall, but in my opinion it really needs to have its scenes rearranged and maybe should even be told from first-person perspective. As-is, it's not easy to connect with.