REVIEW: Witch King (x 2) by Martha Wells
“I didn’t know you were a… demon.”
“You idiot. I’m the demon.”
Kai’s having a long day in Martha Wells’ WITCH KING….
After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai-Enna wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.
But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?
Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.
He’s not going to like the answers.
Review
Well, I think a lot of people are going to jump on this book after having arrived at Martha Wells’s writing through Murderbot. I have tried one or two of Wells’s fantasy books and should have remembered why I never got far in them. A good friend of mine adores Martha Wells and has been reading her fantasy books for decades. She doesn’t, however, like the Murderbot series as much. I wonder if Wells is someone who, for most people, you either like one type of her books or the other. SciFi or fantasy but not both.
Readers are dropped into the action with no information beyond the info-dump of dramatis personae before chapter one begins. Should readers have to constantly flip back to this list in order to try and remember who the heck these (many, many) people are? My answer is a resounding ‘no.’ But the first chapter is action packed and I hoped that this would finally be the Wells fantasy that worked for me.
Things kick off with the main, and titular, character (who is not, by the way either a king or a witch) discovering he, and a good friend, have been done very, very wrong by someone. But who? They don’t know and that (I think) is the driver for the plot. Who betrayed him? To find out, we’re going to be taken on a long and circuitous journey.
This book is packed with world building and yet I still often found myself completely baffled as to what was going on, who was who, and why did I need to be told in such detail what the characters were wearing. The littlest details of the settings were described but often I wondered, why do I need to know this? What difference to the plot does it make? I want to feel something for the characters and thus be invested in why it matters to discover who did them wrong. But I found that I just didn’t care. The action switches back and forth between past events and the present which served to yank me out of any reading rhythm I had built up. And since we know the outcome of the major event of the past, that negates any suspense about it in the current day sections.
So many characters read as flat to me. They mostly had long, elaborate “fantasy” names and titles and relationships and were listed as being from yet another kingdom or city-state as if this is supposed to mean something to me. Who are these people and why should I care about them?? Oh, that’s right. I don’t know who they are and I’m not being made to care. If this was the second, or even the third, book in a series, I would expect all this detail and all these characters and would, I hope, give a flip about them but that’s not the case. Yes, I suppose I could go back to the listing of characters but they all blurred into a mass without much to distinguish them. Too many times I huffed in annoyance about being told what this one or that one was wearing or what they just changed into (seriously, there is a lot of this). Actions are painstakingly told in the minutest detail but all I could mentally do was scream “Cast the spell and get on with it!”
I was about a third of the way through and it was making my head hurt. After reading for an hour or so, I would have to take a break. There is a difference between complicated and confusing and I realized I was slogging along and getting less and less interested. This book is just so bloated with description and characters that I felt as if I was frantically doggie-paddling just to keep my head above water. This is not why I read books. For many readers I can see this being their catnip but for me it was just wasn’t doing it. DNF
~Jayne
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I discovered her through her raksura chronicles and it pulled me out of a reading slump, the murderbot books are amazing for me but almost all of her other fantasy books are a hard pass.
I started this one and have put it down for now and I was struggling to figure out why her fantasy books don’t work for me and I think you nailed it re: dog paddling to keep your head above water!
I like getting lost and immersed in a world but with the fantasies i have tried outside of raksura I have felt like I was drowning.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, @Jayne.
Here is some of what I wrote on @Sirius’ review: “I have a lot of admiration for the author’s ability to build this complex world and to go back and forth between two timelines, and I was sufficiently intrigued to read to the end. However, I doubt that this is a book I will reread.”
I am a big fan of the Murderbot books; however, the Raksura and other fantasies by Martha Wells that I’ve tried did not grab me. My daughter though, like @J, likes both the Murderbot and the Raksura books.
I have mixed feelings about character lists in books. I don’t feel that I should need to use them when reading a book (the story should give me what I need), but it’s sometimes good to know they are there.
@J: It’s hard to relax into a book when I feel as if I’m going down for the third time! Well my friend loves the Raksura books, too so maybe I’ll try one of those.
@Kareni: Re – character lists. Lindsey Davis does these as well for her Roman mysteries. I find I usually read the first page or two of them as the descriptions are funny but by the fourth page, I’m ready to read the book, thank you.
I’m curious. When you finished reading, did you get the feeling that this is the start of another series or that the book is a standalone?
@Jayne, I felt that it might be the start of a series. I wonder if it is or if it’s intended to be a standalone book.
@Jayne: OMG excellent description Jayne.
@Kareni: I feel like no one is writing stand alone books anymore lol. I am exaggerating a bit of course , there are many books I have not read, but when I think of genres I do read I dont think I am exaggerating much.
@Sirius: I don’t think you’re exaggerating. Some of them come right out and tell you this is Book 1 of the Blahblah Trilogy but others let you get to the end and realize that some major plotline hasn’t been finished yet and then you know.
@Sirius: Thanks. I am still in awe that you managed to finish it.
@Jayne: I need to get a rid of the preconception that one should not abandon ARC lol. I just feel so guilty to do so .@Jayne: The ones you know at the end are the worst.
@Sirius: I used to force myself to read all the (at that point mainly paper) arcs that I got. This resulted in some dismal reading experiences. Finally about ten years ago, I realized this wasn’t doing me or the publishers any good if it resulted in a low grade and a miserable me. At that point, I began to put *much* more thought into the arcs I request as well as being more willing to admit that a book is not working for me.
@Jayne: oh yeah that part I do well :) ( choosing my arcs carefully), but sometimes it still does not work and I do need to tell myself the same thing you did and that DNF arc is okay
This is so interesting. Thanks for the review- I’d already decided it probably wasn’t for me but this confirms it. I don’t mind having to do some work to follow a book but that sounds like too much for me too.
I read the first Murderbot around when it came out. I loved it and that inspired me to try her Raksura fantasy series next. I didn’t think it was as well written or compelling as Murderbot but I enjoyed it enough to inhale the entire 5 book series, plus all the novellas, in 3 months.
The Raksura books reminded me of the epic fantasy adventure books I grew up loving, and also reminded me why I drifted away from that sub genre – so, so much plot, so many characters, so many different povs, so many names to remember. I prefer more character development and less breakneck action.
Here’s my GR review of the first Raksura book.
“I grew up loving Narnia, Pern and the show Gargoyles and this was the updated fantasy adventure that I didn’t know I needed.
It features shape shifting flying lizard beings (Raskura) with an incredibly complicated biology and social structure, in a really dangerous world. Plus lots of low key queer rep (even though the Raksura don’t think like that).”
@cleo: Are a bunch of characters dumped on readers quickly in the Raksura books?
@Jayne: So there are definitely a lot of characters introduced quickly but I think what made it work for me is that the main character also has no idea what’s going on despite the people around him acting like he should know the rules.
I also don’t think I found the new characters as overwhelming although the books are not standalones, the last two read as if they should have been one woth the way the fourth book ended which I was not a fan of but works if you can get the full series at once
@Jayne: there’s going to be a second book. I saw Martha Wells speak recently, and she confirmed this–I don’t know if it was originally bought as two or not.
Ah, I am in the group that likes the Murderbot books, but loves the various fantasy books and Raksura books. I’ve been reading her fantasy books as they were published. I like that they are complex and aren’t yet another group of intrepid people on a quest. (ugh). Her Ile-Rien series remind me of fantasy homages to Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Disappointing, but useful. I tried Wells’ earlier fantasies after reading the Murderbot books, and I had a hard time believing they were by the same author. I realize some prefer her earlier writing, but I see the Murderbot series as showing a big jump in writing skill — I could go on, here — and philosophical thought. I was hoping this new book would bring that to her fantasy side.
I love Murderbot and Witch King and especially, my favorite is Death of the Necromancer. I trust her as an author to weave together whatever she is doing with flashbacks or multiple POVs into an amazing whole, and she delivers. For me it’s amazing how much punch Murderbot packs in so few pages. And the voice of Murderbot has me rereading over and over again. But in her Raksura and other fantasy books, she has more space to play with social structures. I love how she inverts many fantasy tropes – elderly (dragons) become stronger, not weaker. Hunter gatherers are egalitarian and value the role of women as compared to the yon standard medieval knight in shining armor of most books … City of Bones has kangaroo men that raise babies in pouches! More than that, in all her books she focuses on people who feel out of place but nonetheless find families.
@AG: Thank you for this, AG. I’ve heard a lot of love for the Raksura series and what you say about the rest — “More than that, in all her books she focuses on people who feel out of place but nonetheless find families.” — makes me want to keep trying.