The Year of the Witching

I first read a sample from Kindle and once I was quickly done with the free snippet, I went back to my other book but I couldnt get this one out of my mind. I ended up purchasing the Kindle version and read it in a day and a half. Its one of those stories where you feel the burn of the fires and looks up from reading to see if the characters are sitting beside you because its SO real. Alexis writes magic and her words not only flow easily but are sewn together with an invisible string that leads your eyes from chapter to chapter, not wanting to ever put it down too soon. I felt a kinship with Immanuelle as I imagine many women and girls do. Her strength as a character is something we all want to see within ourselves or at least believe it possible! I give this one 5 stars and cant wait for more from Alexis Henderson!

3.5 stars The Year of the Witching is set in a fictional puritanical society similar to that of Salem, where women and the POC from the Outskirts are persecuted for witchcraft and other crimes that the men of cloth get away with scot-free. Bethel is a society based in hypocrisy and its history is riddled with untruths. I appreciated how Alexis Anderson told a feminist story in which the main character, Immanuelle, is a strong female who is dedicated to changing Bethel for the better by protecting the vulnerable and punishing those who abuse their power behind the Church. There were some positively spooky scenes set in the Darkwood and the witches were both frightening and captivating. Yet, towards the middle of the book, the story began to drag for me a bit. For one, I wanted more interactions with the witches and more magic. I felt the story stalled a bit until we reached the climax. I also felt the relationship between Ezra and Immanuelle was more of a friendship and I could never buy their romance. Their relationship needed to be more developed and I would have loved to delve more into the relationship between Vera and Immanuelle as well. Overall, this was a good debut, there were just certain elements I wanted more of.

I just finished what I can only say is one of the worse debut novels Ive read in a long time. I thought the book held some real promise when I read the digital sample. However, after purchasing the book I came to the realization that I had been suckered. The Year of the Witching is a well paced, well plotted story. Period. Everything else is derivative. Throughout the novel I kept getting the feeling that the author was trying too hard to be original or creative without succeeding. For example, her practice of using alternative words for common nouns such as steed for horse or snuff for tobacco (or weed). Neither really works. Especially since Ive never heard of someone smoking snuff, you snort snuff not smoke it. Her world building was poorly thought out. She states that Bethel had been in existence for a thousand years, yet none of their technology seemed to have advanced past the simple western frontier horse and buggy stage. I could see that if the church had forbidden the use of advanced, foreign technology, but I saw no evidence for that. My overall impression is that the author needs to spend more time writing about the world she knows before she ventures out to invent a new one.

Descriptions, common. Male villains, typical. Female villian, what? why? But mostly, sadly, I felt this author was not writing from her authentic voice.

I don\’t think I\’ve read a book this fast since the Harry Potter books when I was a teenager. I think I was hungry to get to the meat of the story but it never got there. I did like the feeling of being transported to another time but by the end nothing really added up. First, the story up to the end is basically just a retelling of the storyline of most religions; religious leaders – all men – promise salvation and prosperity by following the laws of the religion, the women obey but still are stripped of all their rights and violated on many levels, and then some women try to rise up against it but are ultimately unsupported by the other women who are either \”true believers\” or cannot risk the repercussions of opposition. And then the ending was just a weird mash up of events where suddenly all the women of the parish, over the course of only maybe an hour go from jeering at the protagonist and hungrily calling for her to be burned alive, to inexplicably supporting her (is that what we are calling feminism in this story?). It actually felt a little anti-feminist to me, depicting the townswomen as sheep. Second, the aspect of witchcraft was entirely pointless to the story. This book could have been written and then the witchcraft parts thrown in later because it really had no bearing on the story or outcome. It seems like this was just added to try and make it more original and add interest, since the storyline is so aimless. You expect to learn something about how witchcraft pertains to the story by the end but then you don\’t. Lastly, the editing was terrible. There is actually a mistake early in the book where the protagonist\’s name is switched with her mother\’s in a passage talking about the behavior of the protagonist\’s father. The result is that it seemed like the story was actually going to be about incest and her father coming back from the dead until I read on and realized the mistake. Also, the author gets stuck on certain words or phrases and then uses them with obsessive repetition for a few pages or chapters – I don\’t necessarily blame the author for this – an editor should have ironed these out.

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