“In a continent on the edge of war, two witches hold its fate in their hands.
Young witches Safiya and Iseult have a habit of finding trouble. After clashing with a powerful Guildmaster and his ruthless Bloodwitch bodyguard, the friends are forced to flee their home.
Safi must avoid capture at all costs as she’s a rare Truthwitch, able to discern truth from lies. Many would kill for her magic, so Safi must keep it hidden – lest she be used in the struggle between empires. And Iseult’s true powers are hidden even from herself.
In a chance encounter at Court, Safi meets Prince Merik and makes him a reluctant ally. However, his help may not slow down the Bloodwitch now hot on the girls’ heels. All Safi and Iseult want is their freedom, but danger lies ahead. With war coming, treaties breaking and a magical contagion sweeping the land, the friends will have to fight emperors and mercenaries alike. For some will stop at nothing to get their hands on a Truthwitch.”
There’s a lot to like about Truthwitch. The lead characters are engaging, the world-building is pretty good, the tale’s a fast-moving adventure romp that the reader can read without too much difficulty.
Much of your liking of the book will depend on whether you like Safiya and Iseult (or as they soon become, ‘Safi’ and ‘Iz’). They are young girls who are clearly good friends, and care for each other very much. They work together well, and their relationship is one of the obvious strengths of the book. It is for this that I can see that many readers, and authors such as Robin Hobb and Sarah J. Maas, would enjoy the plot. It is a tale that is unashamedly romantic, thanks to the presence of ‘I love him – but hate him’ Prince Merik. He seems dashing and loyal and someone who Safi flipflops in her feelings towards, which makes for sometimes entertaining dialogue.
The plot itself is quite entertaining and generally well done. Its strength here is that it is easily identifiable as a tale of loyalty, betrayal and revenge, of chasing and being chased, which readers do not have to ponder about for too long. The worldbuilding, creating a world where people have magical powers of sorts – to foretell the future and determine whether someone is telling the truth, to control water, to fly using wind, to follow someone by the scent of their blood – is an interesting one that is used to good effect.
But then… there’s clunky elements, misplaced attempts at humour that don’t work (always a tricky one) and dialogue that at times caused such major cringing that it threatened to depose me of my involvement in an imagined setting. In places the characters over-react wildly, from one minute trying to kill each other to in another being unable to live without each other. Some of their actions are also rather reprehensible. Such devoted loyalty to each other leads our heroines to irrational action. At times they even put themselves before others, even when their actions threaten to put others at risk of death.*
There are places where the language jolted me out of my involvement with the book. I got a little fed up of the term ‘rutting’ being used as an expletive – ‘rutting empress’, ‘rutting gorgeous’, “What’s the rut?”, “Who the rut?”, “For rut’s sake” etc. It also didn’t help in the first few pages when strong waves were bad enough to ‘pummel dolphins’, an image that I’ve struggled to come to terms with since reading it. Though this hyperactive prose does calm down eventually, it seems such a shame to go to enormous lengths to craft a story that can be exciting, engaging and worth reading but to find that instead you are thrown bodily out of the immersive experience by parts of it.
I am sure that there will be others who are more forgiving, but in the end there were too many inconsistencies and plot coincidences to make this one a success for me. I really wanted this one to work, but sadly in the end it didn’t – despite the quote on the cover by Robin Hobb that told me it would. This does not have the complexity, depth or the deft nuances of a Robin Hobb, though it can undoubtedly be entertaining.
In summary, Truthwitch has a lot of elements that many readers will like, but there are others that will annoy some readers. Entertaining yet undemanding, for me this was a book that at times was great but at other times frustrating.
*Example: When one of the girls is gravely ill and possibly close to death, the other girl attacks the captain of a ship they are travelling on and threatens to kill him, even after the captain calmly explains that by doing what she wants at that moment would kill them all. That’s the captain (who has had the indecency to rescue them), the other girl and all of the ship’s crew…
Truthwitch by Susan Dennard
Book 1 of the Witchland Series
Published by TOR UK, January 2016
416 pages
ISBN: 978-1447282044
I’m brazilian and the book has not been released here, so I’m reading in English. When she uses “rutting” I just do not understand!!! It’s so frustrating! A translation doesn’t exist for that word in Portuguese. Can you tell me a synonym?
‘Rutting’: euphemism for ‘sex’, Ellen. But if I remember, isn’t it used here as a curse/swear word?