- Hi hi welcome to another QUEER SCREAMING review! THE WITCH KING is packed with so much good stuff: found family, the fluidity of trans identity, a huge spectrum of genders, sexualities, races, and more.
- Though the book is a wild ride through the fae kingdom, it also covers a lot of hard topics, too: cruel parents, trauma recovery, broken friendships, racism, trying to burn the system down.
- You know I love a book with a prickly protagonist, and that's Wyatt. He makes a lot of bad choices and says a lot of hurtful things impulsively, but much of this book is about him and his friends growing through it together.
- THE WITCH KING is just such a unique book for so many reasons that I can't fit it all here. If you love queer fantasy, put it at the top of your list! 

I really wanted to love this book. I really, really did. The concept of an angry trans protagonist taking on their past? Fantastic. I really want more good trans rep (and I did feel like this book was good on that point!). But this book fell flat on so many other levels for me.

The good: I really liked the characters. There's one point where Wyatt thinks something like "maybe in another life, another universe, things could have been different" and I was like yes I would love an AU of this. They are the sole reason I'm rating this book as high as I am. 

(I read this via audiobook, please forgive any typos or misspellings.)

Non-spoilery critiques: The world-building made no sense. I mean, it made sense in that I understood it, but it didn't in that this is a book about faeries and witches living hidden in the human world and it makes absolutely no reference to how human conceptions of faeries and witches are either 1) different from the truth or 2) influenced by actual interactions with faeries and witches. Like. Do human myths about faeries exist? What about witches? Were they developed independently of the real faeries and witches (since faeries and witches only came to the human world like 500 years ago through a portal) or were they based off real interactions?   Like, if you're not going to at least reference the established mythos surrounding faeries and witches but instead make up your own thing, why call them faeries and witches at all? It almost feels like the author took the tiktok aesthetic of being a faerie or a witch and tried to turn it into an actual species of being. Who are genetically related, for some reason. 

The book does a good job describing the magic of the world so that I understand how it works but not why. Why do witch powers involve tarot and sigils? Did humans steal tarot from the witches? Or did witches discover it in the human world? The book gives me next to nothing about the history of faeries and witches being here. Like, they say faeries and witches have been completely hidden from humans this whole time but someone must have been living on the land the faeries took over, right? Especially since the author does actively point out the colonizing aspect of the faeries coming to Earth. Make it make sense. 

The writing overall was pretty weak to me. I don't mean this because of the amount of slang and internet vernacular, I actually didn't mind that too much. It was more weak in a debut author kind of way. The pacing was weird and there many elements that didn't make sense or that I felt weren't built up to/foreshadowed enough. This book was also openly trying to be an oppression metaphor (there's one passage where Wyatt directly compares the plight of witches to that of queer kids (I listened to the audiobook so I can't find the passage) and a part where he thinks about race in the context of faeries but comes to no conclusions about how it interacts with human racism) but I feel like it missed the mark on so many levels. The main one was just...an oversimplification or lack of understanding of how institutionalized systems of oppression work, oddly enough? Like, it was clear from the beginning that something was rotten in the state of Denmark but the characters were overall too trusting of people they shouldn't have trusted. I felt like this should have therefore contained a lot of political intrigue (which I love) and it just...didn't. 

Spoilery critiques:

One really good example of all of the weak writing is the riot and storming of the palace, that kind of came out of nowhere to me. (And then they just went back to normal??) I feel like there should have been other incidents leading up to that point but instead we're just retroactively told "this has been coming for a long time." But like (sorry to bring real politics in) when the Trump supporters stormed the capital, there had already been other riots and instances of violence on the part of his supporters for years beforehand, and Trump actively incited the riot with his speech and rhetoric. Are we to believe that there had been other riots that no one mentioned, that the Guard were involved in, but the royal family still trusted them anyway? And the Guard is supposed to be standing in for the police, right, and they mention early on that Derrick is the head of the Guard and the Guard is clearly loyal enough to him to arrest Wyatt against the orders of the royal family in the beginning...but then they still expect the Guard to protect Wyatt during the riot and act surprised when the guards betray their posts? What? And why are they so surprised by wrongful arrests and false accusations? Shouldn't Wyatt know not to trust police from the activist work Briar's parents do? Make it make sense!!!

I realize that maybe because this book is YA, it's trying to be an introduction to the concept of police abolition through fantasy for younger readers, but even still, it could have done a much better job at portraying how institutionalized oppression and state violence works, thus making a stronger argument for police abolition, than it did.

Also, it makes no sense that the Guard is the only thing portrayed to be corrupt when they live under a f*cking monarchy! I know monarchy is the predominant form of government in fantasy and that no one, including this book, does a good job of portraying how it's actually a bit more like hereditary fascism than any monarchists want to admit, but to have this book be about oppressive systems of power and then to only come in with an anti-monarchist idea in literally the last five minutes seemed very tone-deaf. ESPECIALLY since they don't really portray how awful and damaging monarchy can be and instead promote the idea that a "good king" can solve all their problems throughout most of the book. Good kings are purely an invention of fantasy. On ne peut pointe régner innocement. No one can reign innocently.

There is also the concept of "fated mates" in this world which I think the author had to have to make the idea that Emyr couldn't/wouldn't marry anyone but Wyatt work, but I really expected that trope to be broken down and critiqued more than it was. Wyatt is so mad about it being bio-essentialist and perfect-baby-making-genetics-based in the beginning but then comes around in the end when it's revealed that some other monarchs are gay and/or can't have kids. Am I the only one who thinks that's not enough? If the cisheteronormative idea of fated mates is so predominant in faerie society, couldn't it be that the monarchs are only able to get away with their "unusual" mates because of the immense privilege of being monarchs? What about normal people who have "unusual" mate situations?

(Also, side note, but with how weird the fated mates shit was and how weird the world-building around faeries and witches was, there were several moments throughout this book where I wondered if this was a converted A/B/O story. So. There's that.)

Finally, it was really weird to me that, in the end, when it's revealed that there are still faeries in Faery, they automatically believe those faeries are bad? I know those faeries hate them for abandoning them on a dying world but...that seems fair right? But instead the main characters (including Briar!) embrace the idea that they're murderous savages? I can only hope that idea is critiqued and disproved in the sequel (which I assume will be a thing given how the book ended) but I can't say I'll read it.

I loved this so much!!!

Rep: white gay trans male MC, Black male love interest (Wyatt-sexual/aspec), fat indigenous (Seminole) bi-asexual female side character, sapphic nonbinary side character, sapphic side characters, achillean side characters,

CWs (from the authors website): Violence (including gore, arson, attempted murder, and murder), Misgendering (accidental and intentional, including deadnaming—however, the deadname is not written out), Abusive parents, Childhood sexual harassment and assault (harassment is graphic, assault is not), Grooming/predatory behavior between an adult and a teenager, Infertility and miscarriage mention, On-page panic attack, Suicidal ideation and brief mentions of suicide, Drug use. 

The characterization was not as complex as I would have liked, especially with the side characters. Wyatt and Emyr’s relationship suffered from a lack of conversation. The ending was a bit too dramatic and rushed for me, but fit the book as a whole. I think the target audience is younger teens who want to read darker books.