Wicked Love

I recently finished reading Wooing The Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis. This is book #1 in the Queens of Villainy series.

This exclusive edition features an exclusive redesigned dust jacket by @nadiarausa ⁠, with stenciled edges by @nadiarausa , a reversible dust jacket by @queen_joey, foiled hardcover case design by  @carnemia, and end pages by @artbysmashley. The book is also signed by author Stephanie Burgis on an author page with an author's letter bound into the book as well as bonus content.

~POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT~

  Rating: 3.5/5 stars

"In a Gaslamp-lit world where hags and ogres lurk in thick pine forests, three magical queens form an uneasy alliance to protect their lands from invasion…and love turns their world upside down.

Queen Saskia is the wicked sorceress everyone fears. After successfully wrestling the throne from her evil uncle, she only wants one thing: to keep her people safe from the empire next door. For that, she needs to spend more time in her laboratory experimenting with her spells. She definitely doesn’t have time to bring order to her chaotic library of magic.

When a mysterious dark wizard arrives at her castle, Saskia hires him as her new librarian on the spot. “Fabian” is sweet and a little nerdy, and his requests seem a little strange – what in the name of Divine Elva is a fountain pen? – but he’s getting the job done. And if he writes her flirtatious poetry and his innocent touch makes her skin singe, well…

Little does Saskia know that the "wizard" she’s falling for is actually an Imperial archduke in disguise, with no magical training whatsoever. On the run, with perilous secrets on his trail and a fast growing yearning for the wicked sorceress, he's in danger from her enemies and her newfound allies, too. When his identity is finally revealed, will their love save or doom each other?"

Wooing the Witch Queen is a perfectly pleasant and inoffensive cozy fantasy romance, but it had the potential to be so much better, and by the end of the book I was really frustrated by that.

Right off the bat, this story is doing something interesting with its gender dynamics. It delivers exactly what it promises: a powerful, fearsome sorceress and the hapless, slightly pathetic librarian who falls in love with her. Unfortunately, that’s sort of… it. Both of these characters remain pretty flat and archetypical. Their “romance” is very surface-level, which is surprising, because the groundwork is laid for more - both characters are traumatized by abusive childhoods and both have grieved terrible losses of loved ones. But the book is thoroughly uninterested in letting them explore or actually connect based on those things, treating them instead like set dressing in the background.

Ultimately, though, my biggest problem with this book is that one glaringly obvious tweak would have made it a million times better: Saskia should have realized Felix’s identity immediately. (Or initially suspected it and quickly confirmed it. Or just figured it out very quickly after hiring him.) I cannot stress enough how much this would have fixed. The initial premise - Felix accidentally obtains work in his political enemy’s castle due to an improbable misunderstanding - is fun and silly in theory, but it becomes increasingly strained as the story goes along, until it is way, way past the point my suspension of disbelief can handle. Maintaining this misunderstanding/secret identity becomes excruciating, forcing the story to constantly bend over backwards to accommodate it and making basically every character seem clueless and incompetent along the way.

That’s a particular problem for Saskia, because it causes the book to narratively undermine itself. Saskia is this character who is both an outsider (magically) and simultaneously a woman in a man’s world, struggling to hold onto her power and authority. She faces constant challenges from other characters who want to undermine her, and she’s righteously self-assured of her own competence. Except… that doesn’t land so well when she is actually kind of incompetent. Like, ridiculously so. Like I can’t even believe how stupid this character has to be in order to continue not noticing who Felix is.

Alternately, if she had realized who he was and chosen to pretend not to, I would have actually believed she’s this clever, competent character she’s supposed to be. It could have created some fun cat and mouse scenarios. We also could have gotten a more genuine, deeper connection between the characters and avoided a sex scene that… well, I won’t quite call it “ethically dubious,” but I certainly didn’t like it.

I doubt I’ll read book two

Check out Wooing the Witch Queen, and discover what happens when you fall for your enemy.

Happy Reading :)