Review by blewballoon - The House Witch

blewballoon 's review for:

The House Witch by Delemhach

3.5

adventurous funny lighthearted slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Tough to rate this one, but I'll go higher as I tend to do. I think the book has good intentions, but not always the best execution. The balance between the things I liked and disliked is pretty narrow, but I think the scales slightly tip towards things I liked.

Pros:

Fun premise
Slice-of-Life fantasy
Likable or entertaining characters
Cat

Cons:

Way too many conflicts and plot points that are resolved or progressed via everyone involved getting blackout drunk. (This happens at least 3-4 times)
Rough prose that definitely needed some stronger editing
Audiobook narrator doing a questionable voice for the Cat perspective, and those segments being strange in general.

Somewhere in the middle are the found family, comedy, world building, and romance. I think those aspects were okay but not amazing. Also up for debate is that most of the larger plot points and setups are not resolved in this book and are left for the sequels. Your mileage may vary with how you feel about some of the "lessons" and "messages" that the book tries to tackle about sexism and classism via the mouthpiece of the male main character.

The audiobook narrator did a pretty good job, I appreciated that they didn't try to do high feminine voices for the female characters, but the cat segments mentioned above were... a choice.

Content Warnings