A review by wilt
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

• Loveable characters? No

1.0

very sad to say i found witness for the dead dreadfully and thoroughly boring after i loved goblin emperor SO much. i am very disappointed. 20 pages in i thought to myself 'surely this will pick up sometime soon' and then it didn't, and never at any point did i feel invested in any of loosely strung together struggles of barely fleshed out characters and the utter lack of impact felt by major events. the goblin emperor did a very good job of telling a concise story, firmly packed with just the right level of details. the witness for the dead, however, was a whole lot of nothing. how celehar was reduced to such a nothing character when he was so interesting in the snippets we got of him in goblin emperor is pretty impressive, especially as we are given his first person perspective, but i also really hated this story structure with zero chapter breaks and weird little side quests that also added nothing of lasting substance to his story, and just made the entire mess feel disjointed and distracted in the type of book it wanted to be. i also couldn't help comparing the opera murder sideplot (which i'm still confused on whether or not it was intended to be the main plot) to Point of Dreams by Lisa A. Barnett & Melissa Scott, which also featured a mystery murder at the heart of a theater in the middle of a fascinating and intricate fantasy city, but was way more engaging, actually fun to read, and whole lot gayer (including but not limited to lesbians secretly fucking in the attic, on page, in 2001 no less, as opposed to what Witness gave us - a weeping lonely lesbian blackmailed into silence for her shameful secret). 

catastrophic bombing of expectations. some of these ideas could have been interesting, but i cannot believe how they were chosen to be presented. 1/5 stars.