The Witch & The City

Jake Burnett — 2023

The prison-city of Osylum floats in the midst of an endless abyss. The reclusive Lady rules it; distant, inscrutable, and never seen. Her will is imposed by the Wardens, eldritch creatures who tend to the convicts’ needs but also ruthlessly purge anyone who tries to escape. Osylum’s newest inmate, the witch Oneirotheria, has no memory of who she is, where she came from, or why she is imprisoned. Instead, her mind is a mess of spells and lore and other people’s voices. The city mirrors her internal confusion; a jumble of broken buildings covered in hundreds of snippets of graffiti. As Oneirotheria re-assembles her own shattered past (aided by a few inmates of dubious intent), she learns she may hold not just the key to escape, but the intertwined secrets of the city’s origin and a lost love that transcends countless lives. For readers of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and Madeline Miller’s Circe, The Witch & The City introduces a lyrical and baroque fantasy world, where an ocean lurks behind every mirror, puppets pull the strings of the living, and even the skulls have secrets to tell... if a witch knows how to listen.

Reviews

@liazhang

Jan 7, 2024

I absolutely adored the premise for this: escape from a prison city guarded by shadow creatures, with the main character being a witch who remembers nothing about her past except a mass of spells. I don't really consider this to be a bad book, per se, but it definitely wasn't enjoyable for me. I did not like the writing style, nor was I able to connect with any of the characters. The writing in this book is very... frantic? A rush of events just happening, with not enough explanation, just a stream of consciousness like someone had a gun to the narrator's head and they had a five minute time limit to speak. Objectively, this does make a lot of sense plotwise, as the main character herself is portrayed with a frenzied mind. However, I can't say that I liked reading it, or that I understood a whole lot of it. The writing gets much calmer at the halfway point, and while I did understand what was occuring then, I did not have a lot of context for it, seeing as I could not understand anything from the first half. I also thought the twist at the end with the mc was lazy (it was hinted at throughout the book, so it didn't come from nowhere, but I simply felt it was quite unoriginal). This is simply one of those books where I do not think I was the target audience, but if you enjoy the premise or like high fantasy, I'd recommend you read it and form your own opinion. Thank you to Netgalley for the copy.