It’s hard not to root for Wyatt, who has an unmatched cranky resilience and a well of (justified!) deep rage at the world. Wyatt’s voice as the narrator is also quite distinctive and funny with a dark humor I appreciated. I enjoyed that the primary characters, Wyatt and Emyr, both feel like complex, completely rendered individuals with shades of gray. I love that this book is injecting queerness into fae/fairy romance, a subgenre in both YA and adult romance that is often tragically heterosexual. In the initial chapters where we meet Wyatt and start to see Asalin I was pretty drawn into the story, and I was curious especially to see how the relationship between Emyr and Wyatt was going to play out.īefore I get into my critiques, I’ll start with some of the stuff I liked about this book.

This is very uncool, although it becomes clear quickly that Emyr is also dealing with some extenuating circumstances.

Emyr, the fae prince, then shows up and demands Wyatt come back to Asalin and marry him under the threat of death from a magical betrothal contract they signed when they were children. When we meet Wyatt, he has escaped a massively abusive and traumatizing situation and system in his hometown, the fae village of Asalin, and is living fairly happily in the human world with a loving adopted family, including his best friend, Briar. The Witch King is about Wyatt, a young witch. With that said, I also think a decent number of people will be ride-or-die obsessed with The Witch King hopefully my review can help you figure out if that might be you! The central character arc and romance also did not quite work for me. Unfortunately, my overall impression of this book is that it is messy in execution and suffers from plot bloat, inconsistent and/or flat characterization, and a jarring shift in tone. I respect deeply what this book was trying to do, and there were a couple things about it I quite enjoyed. I wanted to like this so badly!!! But I ultimately kind of did not. And the initial chapters really drew me in. I was very excited about this #OwnVoices book about a trans witch bound in a magical engagement with his childhood best friend, a fae prince. Not with the reading of it, so much, but with trying to parse my feelings and opinions on it, which are complicated. Genre: LGBTQIA, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adultīitchery, I struggled with this book.

The Witch King by H.E. Edgmon