Published: July 18, 2017
Pages: 320
WITCHTOWN is a story about a mother and daughter duo that go from place to place in search of the greatest heist.
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a copy.
What drew me to it: Witches? Heists? Secrets? Sign me up!
I highly anticipated this book in hopes for a story that revolved around witches and a heist that as the synopsis anticipated and it delivered that. For about ten pages. There’s a gross injustice in the fact that the synopsis and the story and hardly related at all. The story rather reflects on the main character, Macie, and how she comes to struggle with the decision of whether she wants to leave the life of heist behind or not.
To understand the setting that Oakes wants to establish, you’re better off with the prologue than anything explained throughout the book. The WORLDBUILDING is told to you to be the equivalent of reservations called havens, but for witches. There should have been more showing of the horrible conditions and oppression that the havens experience, but instead the reader is provided with Witchtown. The only oppression they face are the religious zealots that live immediately outside the vicinity.
The CHARACTERS are an even bigger issue to tackle. The reader is provided with a good number of characters in the beginning and one would think they’d be important to the story later, but in all reality, they’re just there to fuel Marcie’s thoughts.
As she’s the main character, I expected her to be morally gray as she navigated the complication of a life of crime mixed with genuine want for friendship with the people of Witchtown. The second half was true, at least.
The truth is, Macie doesn’t have much of a personality. Her entire character is about the relationships she holds with males AKA her love interests. If they removed them from the story, there wouldn’t even be anything to read.
There are two people throughout the story that Macie talks down on: her mother, Audra, and the teenager ‘high priestess’, Autumn. It’s all standard stuff, but what connected the two was how sexually promiscuous they are. This easily translate to the fact that these sort of people can only be the embodiment of evil. Which, considering what you learn later in the story, makes Macie out to truly be a hypocrite.
I don’t even want to talk about the LGBT+ rep in the book.
Just know bury your gays trope is true for one of the two couples.
Congratulations on meeting your diversity quota, I guess.
The only character that showed up consistently that I liked was Rafe and he doesn’t even have a role other than to provide a reason why Macie shouldn’t pursue her insta-love for Kellen. He’s also the only POC in the book and Macie initially thought he was a drug dealer.
I’d normally talk about the PLOT around now, but honestly, there wasn’t much of one. There was a skeleton of a plot at the beginning and the very end, but the middle? Marcie shenanigans that made absolutely no sense to the synopsis.
The ending was rushed and left no room for explanations as to why or how. The only positive aspect of it was that I didn’t need to read it anymore.
TROPES played a huge part in WITCHTOWN as well and I don’t generally mind them, but in this story it was just the icing on top of an already horribly baked cake. For the sake of my sanity, I’ll only list the one that stood out to me the most (since others are already mentioned earlier in the review).
Later in the story, Kellen and Macie kiss for the first time. What bothered me though was that Macie had continually mentioned her attachment to another guy and that she wasn’t interested, but that’s easily ignored as Kellen decides ‘hey, who cares, I’m the main love interest now I can be a certifiable creep and get away with it because that’s how YA works in the mind of my author‘. To make matters worse, he does it to shut up Macie up because she was mad at him and expressing her anger.
The biggest letdown of WITCHTOWN is that it had all the right tools to make such an amazing story that could have been remembered for years to come. Unfortunately, it had the wrong person to write it.
Would I recommend? If you want a story that’s more about a girl and her forming friendships than anything else.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Trigger Warnings: suicide mention, alcohol consumption
Here is a link to the GOODREADS page if you want more information on it.
Here is a link to the AMAZON page if you would like to purchase it.
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