CB12’s Reviews > Witch Queen Rising > Status Update

This is like a high 2 so I’ll round up, but it needed multiple rounds of both developmental and line editing to be a more cohesive, flowing story

The world building has great bones and I think it really did NOLA as a setting justice, but it had too many ideas poorly executed

I hope this author eventually gets more comfortable cutting a scene short and just picking up at a more interesting point 15 mins - hour later. Does the reader need to be in 10 chapters back to back in the same evening walking through everything Phine is doing

Another inconsistency that an editor would have picked up: sometimes Moira is described as having curls, sometimes she’s described as having dreads

I don’t like in general when books switch tones in the last act in order to up the stakes by becoming gratuitously violent…like she was stress baking in the first part of this book and now it’s like mass murders every other page

Outfit and makeup descriptions after 70+ of her people were murdered like we whyyy do we need these details

More plot holes! Why are the laws of the world so flimsy that vampires have been around for eons and they’re just now extorting the witches for the ability to day walk?

Julian’s strategy makes no sense….

Let me kill everyone who has the magic to give me the thing that I want. I feel the author could have killed off 1-2 characters close to Phine (or even kidnapped them) and it could have played the exact same role in the narrative. Clearly the massacres are there for shock value and the characters aren’t even giving the tragedies appropriate emotional weight

And if the necromancers were strong enough to take down vampires, why were the witches just sitting twiddling their thumbs for days while their people were going through it? The power scaling is off

It’s like the author wanted to up the stakes with the explicit violence and got stuck in a cycle of describing it to a point where the character’s eventual reactions to it days later felt ineffective

And sometimes Phine’s reactions to things feel delayed? Why did she need multiple nights of the (spoiler spoiler) witch murders from the vampires to come up with a plan for retaliation or to even confront Julian?

I feel like 70 of her people dying brought the point home? Also I def feel her remorse and grief about the situation (that she directly caused) was quite muted in context

Spoiler spoiler but I feel like what was promised as the overarching plot (i.e. the blight that was making the witches sick) got replaced with this whole vampire war (which, tonally feels remarkably more gory and gruesome than anything in the book previously). The whole plot feels just like a deviation from all the other threads the author has opened up and imo is being executed quite rushed