“The League of Gentlewomen Witches” - India Holton
🧹 I only got through 60% of this one before giving up. What I read lacked a good villain or plot twists, and relied exclusively on the romance between Alexander O’Malley (a roguish pirate we met in book 1) and Charlotte Pettifer (a Jane Austen super fan and witch). But even that romance followed the same enemies-to-lovers trajectory as Cecilia and Ned’s romance in book 1. TLGW read like an imitation of the first book, and even more devastatingly so when Ned and Cecilia appear in this one.
🧹 Holton has a unique writing style - almost like a screenplay in novel form. As with book 1, to enjoy these books, you must embrace the madcap. Books in this series don’t take themselves seriously, and neither should you.
🧹 The Wisteria Society of lady pirates loathe the Wicken League as the latter consider the former to be a lesser subgroup of witches lacking both class and merit. At first, I was pleased to see so many familiar faces return: Ned, Cec, Nopla, Lady Armitage, and Mrs. Rotunder to name a few. But as I got further along, it felt like nothing new was added plot-wise.
🧹 I tried really hard to lean into the whimsy here; as I said with book 1, it’s not really my usual fare. However, book 1 gave us an outlandish buffoon of a villain, murky motivations, and crisscrossing plot currents to keep things jumping from the beginning. If TLGW does the same, it’s definitely missing from the first half of the book, and I DNF so I’ll never know. Tragic.
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