A review by centrifugepolitics
The Witch and the Vampire by Francesca Flores

dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This is somewhere between a 2.5 and a 3 for me, but I think it's fair to round up based on the great potential in the premise and the central relationship which I thought was sweet if underdeveloped. I was instantly drawn in by the premise and the cover (the cover!) of this one but was let down by the execution and the surface level plot.

Pros: The main relationship, and even the brief, brief three-way friendship with Ava, Kaye, and Tristan had really good seeds and I thought the romance was actually really sweet and believable. I wanted to see more of it and more of them working together (which we unfortunately don't get, the two separate for almost the entire climax).

The enemies-to-lovers aspect started really well and you could see these two girls who, due to circumstances beyond their control, had ended up on opposite sides. The tension between them is real up until about 40% into the book. The story should have stuck with that slowburn but, as I go into below, the characters don't have the depth to allow that to develop later.

I liked the vampire-witch dynamic of the world and that aspect should have been emphasized instead of the two countries/emperor/government stuff. The idea that
witches were hated until they were utilized as vampire slayers and that complicated history
should have been at the forefront.

Cons: This really isn't a Rapunzel retelling at all and I think the book suffers from being pitched as one. The only resemblance is Ava being kept captive by her mother in a tower in the beginning, and having long hair but she escapes 10% into the book and gets a haircut like 20% in. More time should have been spent developing the worldbuilding and characters' interactions instead of squeezing the story into a Rapunzel box.

The characters, their thoughts, and relationships never get much deeper than what is written on the page. Everyone states exactly what they are thinking and then acts on the shallowest impulse. There could be some interesting exploration of Ava's messed-up relationship with her mother or Kaye's complicated relationship with Tristan, but it never really gets explored which feels like such a waste. Nothing lingers long enough to be delved into because everyone is busy running with whatever new characterization they have in the moment.

This book also has a weird tone issue which is affected by weak worldbuilding. The characters use a lot of modernisms so it never feels like a real fantasy and the country, culture, and history are never meaningfully significant to what is happening. Characters die, sometimes brutally, and it feels like it comes out of nowhere because the stakes and character depth haven't been developed enough to bear the weight.
All the parents dying one by one at the end was really abrupt and then Tristan's death was completely glossed over. There's no sense of lasting impact.
There's a much more mature story lurking somewhere in the background but we aren't reading it.

The vampires are intriguing but one second they're killing people for fun/to survive and the next second they feel really bad about it and only want to drink animal blood. This could be an interesting dilemma, what does the world look like when this species has to feed on humans to survive? Can that be worked out? But this book doesn't seem interested in looking deeper at that.

Overall: Compelling premise, first draft execution. I would have liked to see the actual interesting bits of this book be given first billing.

I was given an ARC by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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