The Black Witch Series Book Review
a book series review no on asked for
Young Adult literature is my favorite genre of fiction. So good!
Throughout my years reading this category of story I have seen so many great ideas outlined so masterfully, so vividly, that my geeky little heart fell deeply in love.
Being the geek that I am, nonfiction stole my attention for more than a few seasons, as it is wont to do.
Fairy Porn has now reignited my thirst for fiction after many long moons apart. This genre certainly did… grow up a bit since we were last together. With all the attention these days to the pleasures of the flesh, it is exposing some of the more insidious flies in our cultural ointment, IMHO.
For all the philosophical ideals, thinnly veiled societal critiques, and espousing of the virtures of Animism that I totally get down with in this series, the author’s use of this one trope at the very end is what speaks louder than anything.
The unwitting upholding of Purity Culture in the final arc of our protagonist’s narrative is the sneakiest seed of Shadow(if you will) especially given the current political climate forcing “fertility” on those with the body parts to do so.
Honestly, it’s not only our Hero who get’s the Purity scrub. All the players do. For as open and diverse as the pairings are, the book stays true to our most unconscious cultural beliefs about sexual right relationship, who is good and bad when it comes to desire, and what is unspokenly required from us when we tread too close to the line of “indecency”.
This recording does have some spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.
Access the Voice Note Here:
This article was originally published on Substack. You can read the original here.
Audio Transcription:
The Black Witch. I am probably one of the world's slowest readers. As much as I love to read and as high as my retention is, the dyslexia that I walk with prohibits fast reading. So it's taken me, I don't know, seven or eight months to read the Black Witch series.
And I have had people in my life say, well, why not do audiobooks as well? And yeah, that's true. My retention is very, very limited for audio learning or audio, you know, absorption. So it's not my preferred method. I genuinely enjoy the act of reading. And then also, often, I have the experience of just being annoyed by the narration of audiobooks. So, you know, I'll have a certain idea of what the character is supposed to sound like in my head. And then that is not what it sounds like being narrated. And it's just, it's not pleasant. It is not pleasant for me. So here we are, the quandaries.
Alas, I am just pages away from the completion. And frankly, it's excruciating. So the first book in the series, I received, you know, it was fairly lackluster for me. I experienced it as being drudgery for the first two thirds of the book. I didn't know where it was going. It just seemed excruciating and long. I did appreciate the author and her just skill in writing. She has a beautiful vocabulary. She's not using the same adjectives and, you know, descriptors in multiple paragraphs at a time. It's varied. But yeah, the story itself just seemed like, what did I get myself into? And so the people around me who had read this series encouraged me to keep going.
And in fact, one of my mentors told me, yeah, that first book probably could have been four chapters. But, you know, it's in service to world building and character building and all of that. And then the story picks up towards the end of the first book. And boy, I really, really enjoyed it. And of course, for anyone who knows me, that should come as no surprise. This is a very thinly veiled critique on late stage capitalism and so much more than that as well. But including, you know, Christian nationalism, frankly.
And I think that one could say evangelism of really any creed. Because when, no matter what your religious beliefs are, when religion becomes part of the state and starts oppressing people and saying some people are good and other people are bad and should be excluded to the point of death and eradication, it doesn't really matter what faith you believe in, it all meets the same ends in those realms. And it's all embodying the same kind of toxicity. So I just really appreciate that.
And the author is also an animist. And of course, I am a huge proponent of storytelling that helps us to move in the direction of embracing animism as a collective species. Once again, I think I just think it's the smart thing to do as intelligent critters or somewhat intelligent critters. I don't believe that animism is the set of beliefs of some kind of primitive human that knowing what we know, having the scientific method, and then going back and deliberately, consciously engaging in an animistic perspective, in my ever humble opinion, is the only thing that will save humans moving forward and keep us on a trajectory of being able to coexist with the rest of life on this planet.
But that is enough of my soapbox for the moment. We're talking about the Black Witch series. So the author really, really does a fantastic job of showing the long term consequences of the path that we're on currently, and helping the reader to see the folly of those ways and how we can move in a good direction. So I really appreciate that. I really appreciate her focus on allowing people to come together and that love and community and accepting the acceptance of diversity as our way out of the current conundrum.
Why I am getting tripped up at the very end of this story, however, like it just stopped me dead in my tracks. And if you don't like spoilers, this is a big spoiler, so you might just want to move along from this moment on. There is a pregnancy trope at the end of this. This is, now mind you, this is a story written for young adults. So we're talking preteens, teens, and early 20s. That's the age group that this book is marketed to. The protagonist of this series is what, between 16 and 20 years old. I don't know exactly how old she's supposed to be by the end, but if my calculations are correct, she's really only a teenager. She's 18 fucking years old.
And although the author does a fairly decent job, in fact, a pretty good job of showing a variety of relationships that humans can engage in, whether they're homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, I still feel that there's a lot of purity culture being lobbed at us. So I don't know if that was because of the author herself, or because she needed to appease her masters, her editors, to be able to get this published by a publishing house. But it's pretty obvious to me.
So it feels, first of all, it feels superfluous. It's just, I'm so irritated at so many of these YA authors with female protagonists, having them get pregnant in order to save the fucking world. Like it's so, especially in this book, it just seems so unnecessary. And it also seems like a way to appease critics for having this woman have sex with, oh my god, two lovers. She was in love with one and had sex with him. And then he died conveniently. And then she got to have sex with another of the lead characters. Oh, and now she's redeemed in her virtue because she got pregnant. Like she wasn't capable of saving the world on her own. No, no, no, this teenage pregnancy is what it took to save all of humanity. It's just disgusting to me.
And it's irritating. And I'm having a really, really hard time just finishing the last 10 pages of the book because of it. It just seems so unnecessary. Also, I just don't ever want any young women growing up in this world ever again, ever again, thinking that their sex and sexuality can only be redeemed by having children. Because it's simply not true. That is not a woman's pinnacle of being in this world to give birth to a human child.
For some women, it really is. Like that is fully, you know, part of why they incarnated on this planet. They want nothing more than to be a mother. And God bless them. Because obviously our species needs women like that and men like that to be able to, you know, continue forward. However, there are over 8 billion people on the face of this planet. And I'm sorry, but we don't need more humans. I, of course, as you can tell, was raised with a ZPG mentality, zero population growth. ZPG was a big deal in the 70s, if anyone still remembers that period of time. I am proudly Gen X.
So, you know, the millennials might not have been raised like that because their boomer parents already had their rough draft. Children didn't want to continue espousing ZPG because they had grown out of it or whatever. Oh, who knows? Who knows? But that still lives pretty strongly inside of me. And for all of the critics of that kind of movement, who refer to things like economy, well, if we have an economic system built on just massive population growth, then maybe it's the economic system that needs to change and not necessarily, you know, breeding standards. So, that's, again, another soapbox.
Anyhow, I think it's really damaging when we have tropes continuing. So as much as I love this series, I think it's so wonderful. I really, really would like to see more young adult literature coming on the scene that makes it okay for women to explore their sex and sensuality. After all, we are mammals. And it is the females of the mammalian species who carry the heat for the species, right? We experience the turn-on cycles, and then the males respond to the female heat cycles. They will be attracted from miles around to come and get them.
And of course, I'm speaking in a completely binary context, and we know that there's quite a bit more nuance when it comes to human sexuality, in which case I would like to see young adult literature expound upon that diversity instead of reducing it to, and it's, you know, so that's something, again, this series does very well. However, it's not there for the protagonist, which is, I think, the most important character to have being able to explore her desire in all its myriad forms.
All right, that's probably enough. If you have read this series, tell me what you think. Did that come up for you? Are you as annoyed with pregnancy tropes in young adult literature as I am? Because oy vey. It's one of the things that really, really bothered me about the Akatara series. Of course, there's so much more about Sarah J. Moss and all of her stuff. I have read every single book that she's written, by the way, and I do enjoy them, but oh god, there's just certain topics that it's like, oh, that's probably why you got the contract, because you're willing to uphold these ideas. That's fairly problematic.
So anyway, if you've read the Black Witch series, tell me what you think. I'm here for it. You don't have to be as annoyed with pregnancy tropes and teenage literature as I am. Or even adult literature, for that matter. I'm so tired. I'm a breeder as well. I've had a child. I'm just really tired of women being told in this life that that is their reason for existing, is to have children.
I just get off of it, people. If women don't want to have children or if women can't have children, that's a very personal and private matter and we don't need that to be continued in the collective narrative. It's just simply not true. Women, just like men and just like everybody who doesn't identify as either one of those, we have the right to exist and we can find purpose and peace in much more than breeding. All right, that's my two cents for the day. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.