The Tale of the Young Witch book review

The Tale of the Young Witch is a story I wanted to like more than I did: the beginning is strong, delivering potent motivation to our primary character that I could buy into, there is a strong aesthetic/setting in the age of steam, and you have the underlying themes of the destructive potential of prevalent power.

The issues for me come in two major areas, the characters and the prose. The prose is almost good, there is effort to be descriptive and emotive, and the vocabulary is strong, but the descriptions are awkward and expository. Actions or moments would often have one words descriptions shoehorned in, sometimes the same description multiple times over the course of a paragraph, and descriptions (the same description repeatedly) were often used as calling cards for specific characters, resulting in prose that is awkward and just a bit bloated. Exacerbating the awkward angle, was the repeated use of dialogue to exposit to the readers, and not just in the sense of characters expressing things to one another that they would know, but doing it with expositive descriptions, which just reads weird. The prose also over relies on blunt telling to convey character emotions and personality.

The other major issue I had was with the characters themselves: our primary character has neither agency nor an individual goal through the vast majority of the story, and this is present to lesser or greater degrees in most of the characters: the antagonists have more agency and clear objectives, but end up serving little to no purpose other than as proxies, and the secondary protagonists are largely useless, simply existing in the sphere of our MC. The best friend of our MC is so egregious at this that the narrative literally has him possessed and disappear for the entirety of the book’s second half. Most of our MC’s growth happens off screen, and the lack of agency, or objective, or real pressure from the antagonist for much of the book just means theres not a lot for her to interact with, narratively speaking.

I have other small qualms, but ultimately this was a story I just struggled to invest in.