justinlife's Reviews (916)

Overall an accessible read. I think if the content is new, you’ll love it. If you’ve previously dabbled at this intersection or  explored how the witch is used in pop culture, you might not enjoy it as much. 

I wish she added more racial intersection into this work and looked at this a little more globally, but it happens. It’s a solid work. It’s a solid starting point to religion, paganism, and feminism. 

There's something nice about knowing the beats of a genre. The Merciful Crow plays on beat the majority of the book. You have the strong, angry, wronged young woman, her loyal lover, a society that treats her and her people as outcasts, rising up and finding their power, the hero quest, enemies to lovers, etc. One can see this in a lot of genre fiction, particularly Young Adult Fantasy/Sci-Fi. It's not bad, it's formulaic, but it's also refreshing knowing where the story beats are and what's going to happen. 

The Merciful Crow was a fun read that I could not put down. I read the majority of this book in one day. Owen creates a world that's interesting and diverse enough, but with the same tropes we've seen before so we know the ride and how it's going to play out. There's a lot that she does to add her spin on the genre. Women have a lot more power in this book. Not just the young women typically fighting older women, but you see women in a lot roles that others might have written as men. It was nice that characters had different sexualities, from being gay to pansexual. It was lovely that this was not a source of conflict- that Owen created a world where who you loved was just a part of life and no one cared. She gave a glimpse of what that looks like. It was disappointing though that there was not more queer love in this book. Having pan/gay main characters is great, but seeing them in queer relationships would have been cool too. 

I also appreciated how this book ends. Yes, it's the beginning of the series, but it's not like I need to read the rest. It's a complete book on it's own. If we want to explore her world more, then yeah, you can, if not, there's a complete story here.