A review by deadgoodbookreviews
The Witch's Tears by Katharine Corr, Elizabeth Corr

3.0

Full (series) review up on my blog: https://chaininteraction.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/the-witchs-kiss-trilogy-katharine-and-elizabeth-corr-book-review/

Second novels are hard, especially when you’re building on quite a solid ending, by which I mean The Witch’s Kiss has quite a finite ending, this could easily have been a standalone rather than a trilogy. So it takes this book a little while to build momentum, you have to re-establish what ‘normal’ is for Merry and Leo at this point in order to shake things up again.

Leo was always my favourite character (and I think he remains as such) so it was good to see him get a bit more page time (is that the correct term for the bookish equivalent of screen time? I’m not sure…). Anyway, I’m all for queer characters getting more representation in books and while the treatment of Leo is not always perfect I’m pleased that he was there as it elevates the story somewhat.

The plot in this book is slow going, I would almost have preferred it if this had been a duology and had books two and three merged into one. There are a lot of new characters and concepts introduced which I understand takes time, but there’s also a lot of time spent dwelling on the plot of the first novel. I appreciate a lot of this plot was to do with Merry coping with the grief of losing Jack but I ended up feeling quite frustrated with her.

It does start to feel, after a time, that most of the characters in this book’s lives revolve around romantic relationships in one way or another, which, given that this trilogy is called The Witch’s Kiss, is unsurprising. Personally, I end up a little frustrated, especially since the other things that are happening in this book are brutal murders, but I know some people like books that have this focus so if that’s you, then this might be right up your alley.