The American writer Martha Wells has repeatedly won the «Hugo», «Locus», and «Nebula» awards for her science fiction and fantasy novels. And although the author started strongly with fantasy, in Ukraine she is mostly known for her«Killerbot diaries» — space fiction about a humanized android. In 2023, the writer returned to her roots and released the novel «Witch King», which began a new series «The Rising World». In 2024, the book won the «Locus» award for best fantasy novel. This year, it was published in Ukraine by «George», and that’s how the book came to me.
Pluses:
a high-quality edition, which immediately shows that this is a fantasy; a sympathetic protagonist, an almighty demon who knows how to be human and knows the value of jokes; a non-trivial and interesting universe; a well-written text that does not stumble
Minuses:
the main character and other characters do not create empathy with the reader; not everyone will understand the unusual universe with strange names, customs and rules; strange names of places and characters that often confuse the reader; a slow plot with a lot of talk and little action
I was looking forward to it ever since it was announced because I really like «The Killerbot Diaries» and when I got it, I was really happy. But the reading wasn’t as positive as I thought it would be, and it left me confused, to put it mildly. So how was the new novel by the famous American author? Is it worthy of attention and reading? As always, you will find out from the material below.
Witch King
Author Martha Wells
Translator Svyatoslav Zubchenko
Publisher «George»
Language Ukrainian
Number of pages 416
Cover Solid
Year of publication 2024
Size 155×233 mm
Website instagram.com/zhorzhclub
The demon Kysteron awoke a year after his imprisonment. It turns out that he was stuffed into a crystal coffin and put into an underwater tomb because everyone knows that water deprives demons of their power. Through chance and human greed, Kai managed to get out and is now trying to find out what happened to the world while he was gone.
Together with Kysteron, his friend Ziyedi was released. Now they need to find their friends and family, figure out who set the trap for them, and regain their position in the world. But it is obvious that this will not be easy because while the heroes were in captivity, the balance of power in the world changed dramatically.
If you have already seen the not-so-high rating for this book, I want to say the following: this is exactly my assessment. Yes, the book did not work for me, but mostly not because of its overall poor implementation, but because of banal taste. In your case, this may not be the case at all.
I read tons of positive reviews on Goodreads, saw positive videos and reviews. So there are a lot of people in the world who liked this book. But there are also those who share my opinion about this novel, but we are a minority. This means that, in general, the book was quite successful, but not everyone likes everything, but we didn’t get along with «The Witch King», so let’s get to the reasons why.
At the beginning of the book, it had everything I would have liked: three-dimensional, strange characters with a twist, a well-thought-out unusual fantasy world, and a multi-layered storyline with conflicts and two time periods. However, over time, somewhere around the hundredth page, I began to notice that this seemingly extremely well-written book did not bring me pleasant impressions.
The first thing I realized was that — «Witch King» and its characters somehow didn’t connect with me empathically at all. That is, I don’t care what happens to the hero and the others, I don’t root for them, etc. And even though I liked Casteron himself, he was three-dimensional and so on, but we didn’t connect with him. And this is the coolest character here, because all the others, even the secondary ones, turned out to be faded and uninteresting to me, which means I didn’t care about their fate.
Then I thought that the reason for my rejection of the book could be the weakly written text, but no. «Witch King» is written much more vividly and colorfully than all the books of «The Assassin’s Creed Diaries» combined. Those adventures of the humanized android were deliberately flat and sterile to emphasize the character and his initial lack of emotion. But the writer didn’t have to do that here, so I can’t find fault with the quality of the text in «The Witcher King».
Then I started digging into the plot itself, and it turned out that the local story has a boring narrative pace, where the characters, especially towards the middle of the book, do very little action and talk a lot. And the chosen format of two timelines, now and before the imprisonment, in my opinion, does not suit this story. I want to know what is happening now and what they will do afterwards, and not constantly refer to a year ago and dig into the characters’ past.
So, it turns out that Marty Wells managed to create a really interesting universe with an unusual combination of different eras and cultures, but it didn’t grab me at all. I kept confusing names and titles, titles and names. I also didn’t like it at all in its visual and descriptive form. And although I love this kind of setting, I love those times, this one didn’t work for me.
«Witch King» — a well-written novel with at least one vivid character and a ton of empty cardboard characters. There’s a lot of talk and little action, and if anything happens, it’s banal travel and small quests along the way.
But the main thing is different — this connection that was not created, the initially broken empathy that never happened to the main character, gradually destroyed the impression of the book and left me cold and indifferent to the whole story.
The edition of «Witch King» by «Georges» is of high quality and in a larger format. I like the picture on the cover and it immediately shows that this is a fantasy. I like the paper, it’s thick, soft, and yellow, and the font is just right. It has the right size and style, so it’s almost perfect for long reads.
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