Witchy Kingdom (3) (Witchy War) by D.J. Butler

Witchy Kingdom (3) (Witchy War) Reviews

• 
  Felix

  I give this a 4 star mainly on the atmosphere Butler builds. I love the descriptions - he evokes a incredible visionary world that should of been.
• 
  Daniel Shellenbarger

  I slogged through to the end, believing that the series would end here, and what do I find? IT'S NOT A TRILOGY, DAMNIT! Too bad.
  
  As a disclaimer, I'll say that between reading portions of this book, I read two FAR superior high fantasy books (Chris Wooding's The Ember Blade and Brent Weeks' The Burning White) and there's no question that this comparison did this book no favors as it felt like I was going from genius to frustrating mundanity.
  
  In short, the alternate history is shoddy (admittedly, DJ Butler's central ideas have always been off-the-wall out there, but with each additional book, he's done nothing to shore them up with world-development to explain the "hows" and "whys" of his divergent historical record, instead he just keeps making it crazier) and the initial interesting ideas of the first book aren't developed in any way that makes the world actually make sense, it is full of anachronisms indicative of poor research (Youngstown, for instance, which is mentioned repeatedly in these books DIDN'T EXIST in 1815 and it was named after the guy who established it), and name-dropping that just doesn't fit the EXTREME degree of its changes to the timeline. I initially wrote a prolonged diatribe about this but decided that it wasn't worth it (for instance, No Reformation=No Dutch Protestant Rebellion against Spain=No Dutch National Identity/No Dutch Commercial Empire=No New Netherlands (this is just a single example, frankly if you get rid of the Protestant Reformation then the entire course of European history after the 15th century shouldn't be ANYTHING like our timeline, and if you add in that there's a race of pseudo-elves that also lived in Europe at that time, well...)) since most people would assume I'm nit-picking (I'm not, a good alternate history story needs to follow through on its ideas, otherwise it's premise will feel artificial) and so here we are. If you want to make something like this work, you need to be more careful about containing your changes and your name-dropping. That's why the early Temeraire books were great and the later ones were stupid, and Butler has fallen into a similar trap (admittedly, his books were never as good as the first few Temeraire books, but I digress).
  
  The fantasy element is slightly better, in that Butler has a firm idea of his magical systems and is decent as describing them, but frankly, they get so deep into masonic, voodoo, and wiccan stuff that I started just skimming any section that went deep into the magic because it was obtuse and frankly unhealthily obsessed with the occult.
  
  The less said of this book's atrocious theology the better... unlike its predecessors it can't find a good balance between advancing its crazy fictional religion and not insulting real world religions.
  
  The story is a mess: it's a bloated and muddled middle book with a plot that's running in circles for the most part and most of the characters don't really have an arc (or have much to do with each others' stories) and seem to do things for reasons that they themselves don't understand and few things are resolved, my favorite character was hardly in the book and several characters became far less interesting over the course of this book (First and foremost, William Lee, who's gone from being an interesting tortured but sympathetic character to being just a complete a-hole who I think we're supposed to like, but always made me cringe whenever he was on the page). The Point-of-View shifts rapidly within chapters, often paragraph to paragraph and with little effort to keep the reader informed of where they are and who they're following (particularly in the first quarter of the book, which I found insanely frustrating). Subplots are half-developed or thrown at the reader out of nowhere and minor characters suddenly change or become immensely important for reasons that seem confusing at best. In essence, everything that DJ Butler did wrong in Witchy Winter, he does even worse here, and while there were certainly numerous points where I started to get into the book, every time I felt like I was getting into the flow of the story, the author would do something stupid to break up his own narrative and not only make it frustrating to progress but actually emphasize the poorer qualities of his world-building and character-development. I can buy into (and even love) a crazy story if it's confidently and intelligently told but this is like listening to the ramblings of a drunk who can't keep on topic for more than two paragraphs.
  
  I will say that DJ Butler is still a good writer in general: his imagination is impressive, his descriptive abilities are stunning, and his dialect writing is generally quite good, but those are pretty much the only reasons that I'm not dropping this below 3 stars. Sadly, I will not find out how this story ends, but if a book series starts to really tick you off, it's better to just let it go, and that's where I'm at with this one. It's a shame, because I really liked Witchy Eye.
• 
  Annarella

  It's the first book I read by this author and won't surely be the last.
  It's not the first instalment in this series so it could be I lost something but I had no issue in understanding the plot and the characters.
  I liked the amazing world building, the well written cast of characters and the plot that flow.
  I look forward to reading the next instalment in this series.
  Highly recommended!
  Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
• 
  Mary Beene

  This whole series has kept me going and I started book 4 as soon as I finished book 3, even though it was 2 am. It's complicated, with lots of characters and can be somewhat hard to keep up with, but the story is gripping and I'm willing to work a little to get there at the end. This book especially wrapped up many loose threads at the end and sets a great stage for what comes next.
• 
  Micheal Boudreaux

  A Thrill to the End
  
  It is fair to say that every new book in this series is an improvement over what came before - as the Witchy world is unveiled more and more, Butler flexes his writing chops to deliver grander and more ferocious battles, deeper and more soul-wretching stakes, while retaining the little moments of humanity that makes his characters feel so visceral and relatable even in the midst of Beastmen raids, rides across the spirit plains, or treks into the heart of Eden itself.
• 
  Niels

  This book continues D.J. Butler's epic vision of a New World that never existed where magic, monsters and gods do battle among the many nations of the American continent. You will find Aztec warriors and Yankee Necromancers among the pages of this epic series.
• 
  Graham Bradley

  Marking as read for now, but no rating because I need to go back and reread the first two so I can remember all the little side details. There is a LOT going on in this book.