by Kate Elliott
448pp (Hardcover)
My Rating: 7/10
LibraryThing Rating: 4.22/5
Goodreads Rating: 4.12/5
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Book Description:
Book 1 in the Witch Roads duology, the latest epic novel by fan favorite Kate Elliott..
Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned.
When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen—once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall—is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination.
When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered.
The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?
The Witch Roads is the first book in an epic fantasy duology by Kate Elliott that concludes with The Nameless Land, which was just released on November 4. I wanted to read this in part because I loved Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy (Cold Magic, Cold Fire, Cold Steel), and I was also curious about it because she started working on these books just for fun—which led her to rediscover her love of writing after she’d been wondering if she should stop doing it. (You can read more about this in her guest post “If This Can’t Make Me Cry Anymore: Thoughts on Writing and Quitting” from Women in SF&F Month this past April.)
My general thoughts on The Witch Roads are similar to those I had on the last one of Elliott’s books I’d read before this one, her novella Servant Mage: it’s a solid book that’s doing something interesting with its focus and protagonist, but it just doesn’t have the sort of vivid voice and characters that made her Spiritwalker trilogy memorable to me. Although I did love the world of The Witch Roads and the story’s setup, I found that the pacing dragged once the journey mentioned in the description began. Perhaps it works better if both books are read back to back since this is only the first half of a bigger story, but I didn’t think this showed enough character growth to make the pages dedicated to wandering worthwhile—nor were there enough engaging interactions throughout these long sections to hold my interest, especially since what was shown about the characters started to seem repetitive instead of providing new insights into them. It included a budding romance that occurred rather quickly, and it kept bringing up the same rifts, grudges, and arguments through the course of their travels.
There were parts of The Witch Roads I really enjoyed, especially before the beginning of the journey, like its choice of protagonist: Elen, a woman in her thirties who has some life experience. She helped raise her teenage nephew, and though she is a main character with a secret past that catches up to her, she’s also a common person who has been working a fairly ordinary job for some time. (At least, deputy courier would be a fairly ordinary job if not for the potential dangers of fungal spores and the horrors that await those who come into contact with them, but being aware of such things is just part of traveling the paths she does and isn’t out-of-the-ordinary for the world she lives in.)
I felt that the worldbuilding was this novel’s greatest strength, and I loved the brief excerpts from texts that filled in more about the history of the world and empire. It felt like Elliott had carefully considered what she was putting onto the page, and I appreciate that her cultures don’t seem like caricatures or monoliths. When she portrays life within the empire, she shows the distinct split between life as a royal or noble and life as an ordinary citizen: the differences between their experiences and concerns and the ridiculousness of royal protocol to someone like Elen.
For the most part, The Witch Roads felt like reading a decent book by an experienced author who knew what she was doing, but in addition to having some pacing issues, it was missing that special, difficult-to-define spark that makes a book resonate with me as a reader. I’m on the fence about whether or not to read the next book since this had some great worldbuilding accompanied by an occasional nice bit of humor or turn of phrase, and it’s possible the second half of the duology will delve more into the political aspects and parts of the world I’d find more compelling—but given the vast number of unread books out there, I’m unlikely to make finishing this duology a priority.
My Rating: 7/10
Where I got my reading copy: Finished copy from the publisher.
