Witchmark

3 stars

This was not what I was expecting, and I'm not really sure how I got the wrong idea. I think I got this off multiple lists with "Jane Austen but with magic" type of descriptions, but... no, not at all. It's not an alternative historical, but set in a completely fictional fantasy world. There is nothing "comedy of manners" about it, and the setting feels more similar to post-WWI.

The fictional country of Aeland is just coming to the end of a long war, and our main character is a veteran and doctor who works in the Mental Recovery ward helping patients transition back into life after war trauma, of which he is no stranger. He immediately gets sucked into solving a murder, which almost lent it noir vibes in several moments toward the beginning.

There is a distinct separation of classes here, but the larger focus is on the subjugation of a particular type of witches.

The book compares it to slavery, but the way the victims are brainwashed into believing themselves inferior and the fact that it's their own family members taking their autonomy away makes it feel more like extreme domestic abuse run rampant.

This feeling is the most effective part of the book and provides a powerful, believable catalyst for Miles to allow every decision he makes to revolve around avoiding this fate for himself. It was so effectively horrifying, it was almost triggering for me at times.

Unfortunately, I didn't think the book was successful at anything else it was trying to do, and good lord it's trying to do so very many things.

Miles is investigating two HUGE mysteries and seems to be the only person in the entire country who's noticed anything's wrong. How??? It's too big and too obvious for no one else to be putting some of the pieces together.

The romance, which is a small subplot, has the potential to be really lovely but is too underdeveloped for the amount of importance it receives at the end.

And the final reveal is absolutely ridiculous. The levels of horror being perpetrated are too extreme for the reasons behind them. I will believe pretty much anything of the rich and powerful, but this was so disproportionate it felt farcical.

And just every single aspect of the magical system and the larger world-building pertaining to it are underdeveloped. Miles is doing everything in his power to avoid this aspect of his world for the large majority of the book, so I didn't realize I needed to be concerned until around the 75% mark when I suddenly realized there was no way any of the three threads of the book could be resolved satisfactorily in the amount of pages left, much less all of them.

I hate an underdeveloped magic system so much, especially when that lack of development is used to hand wave our way through the climax of everything we've been working towards. I don't mind it with a less ambitious plot, but for me, the depth of development of your magic system needs to match the amount of heavy lifting you're expecting it to do as well as the complexity of world-building. This is a seriously complex world, and I don't believe that the author actually has a firm handle on it beyond the little that we see on page, and that's just not enough for a story that's about saving the world. For a murder mystery, sure. For a romance, sure. For a murder mystery romance that needs to cross dimensions to save the whole world, hell no. This book is just trying to do too much with too little.

Blah. There's a lot of potential, but I will not be continuing with a series that doesn't understand it's strengths and weaknesses.