A review by msteasam
Weyward by Emilia Hart

3.25

This book follows three women from the same family: Altha (1600s) who is on trial for witchcraft, Violet (1940s) who is living on a large estate with her father and brother, and Kate (2010s) who is escaping an abusive relationship.

I was really hoping for a book about witches when I picked this up, but there’s no actual witchcraft happening for 99% of the book. 

Altha’s story feels like an editor told the author she needed to insert a witch trial story. She feels like an afterthought and is not really developed at all as a character. The language and scene setting for this period also didn’t feel realistic to me.

Violet is by far the most interesting and sympathetic of the characters. I wish that the book had focused on her and Graham and explored their lives and relationship a lot more. 

Kate is a frustrating character because she comes across as helpless and dim-witted, even when the point of her story is meant to be surviving serious hardship and gaining independence. She is panicky and consistently makes stupid decisions that could have killed her or other people.
She keeps driving during a blizzard with very little visibility, panics and forgets how to turn on her fog lights (when really she needed to pull the car over), sees a dead rabbit of all things on the road and screams and has a car accident. She uses an email address that she knows her abusive ex has access to - why did she not deactivate everything possible when she left? Her ex shows up at her house and she runs off to hide in the attic, leaving her back door unlocked and the ladder she used to get into the attic in plain view. He’s walking around beneath her and she thinks it’s a great time to sit there and read a manuscript.
I don’t want to victim blame her but she has all the survival instincts of a lemming, to the point that I don’t actually believe she would be able to leave her abusive ex in the first place.

There is a lot of lip service given to this intense connection with nature that the women feel, but I never FELT like these women were part of the natural world. Sure they can hear insects from far away…

There are themes of women being oppressed by men and society in different times - Altha being unable to practice her trade because it puts her under suspicion of witchcraft, Violet is sheltered and has never left her estate, Kate is caged by her sexuality and her abusive relationship - but the themes are surface level and not deeply explored. For a book that leans so heavily on the oppression and trauma of women, it just didn’t feel like it had a lot to say.

How do you make a witch tormenting her rapist with insects for decades and sending him insane boring?
 

There were also a few repeating plots. Altha and Elizabeth both kill for someone they love and Violet and Kate both have a child of rape, but it doesn’t feel like these plots are meaningfully tied to each other in an intentional way. It just felt like the author wasn’t sure what else to do with them.

I can see what the author was going for and I like it but it was not always executed well.

The epilogue was a very poor, convoluted attempt to bring everything together at the end that failed and actually left the whole story worse off.
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