Fully Booked — Episode 15
Reading is something that used to be great, until life got in the way. But it doesn’t have to be like that — you can have a life and love reading, and we’re here to help. Welcome back to Fully Booked, the series for people who don’t know what to read or where to start.
This week it’s a fat failure, but that is kind of the point of this series! I read books regardless of whether they turn out to be good or not, and you might disagree with me and really enjoy this! Waking the Witch is a feminist fantasy and a hot new take on the Arthurian myth which I super did not enjoy! Nothing against the Arthurian myth, I just really didn’t enjoy this writing style at all.
Waking the Witch — Rachel Burge
STATS
Borrowed from — my library’s E-resources
Pages — 258
Trigger warnings — depictions of sexual abuse; depictions of coercion/grooming; portrayals of PTSD; body horror;
Rating — 1 star
Ivy is seventeen and has lived in foster care her whole life but knows her mother is still out there somewhere. When a dark sorcerer attacks her at her work, Ivy’s whole world is thrown into complete turmoil. The only person who believes her is her hated coworker Tom, who drops everything to drive Ivy across the country to follow her hunch. But things are much more complicated than Ivy has been led to believe, and dark powers lurk much closer than she ever thought possible…
Ooooooh girl I got mad ‘not like other girls’ vibes from this book when I was only 10 pages in. “I have a pastel pink bob with a micro-fringe” “I’m seventeen and I have a nose piercing” “I did karate because I’m short, also I hate my tall coworker”. Okay, you’re a hyper-independent woman with emotional unavailability issues who has a chip on her shoulder about her height, WE GET IT. Unsure if it was the author’s intention to make Ivy insufferable when we first meet her or if that’s just me, but either way, same result: Ivy was deeply unlikeable and not relatable. It was also really strange reading something written in first person-present after reading first person-past or third person perspective stories for so long , and it took a really long time to get used to. It also made for some storytelling difficulties because we had a stream-of-consciousness type situation and there was no way to tell what anyone else other than Ivy was thinking, which resulted in some extremely odd projected thinking and generalisations. At points Ivy was even written like she was speaking for every woman in the world, and that was super annoying to put up with.
This is probably the polar opposite of Circe (which is the book I read before this) in that rather than taking a long time to set up the plot, the plot starts happening on the first page and then left me running to keep up. Maybe unsurprisingly, this extremely rapid turn of events made me miss the stateliness of Circe a lot, because rather than being like ‘hm I hope a little more action happens’ it was like ‘OH GOD SLOW DOWN I CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THIS TURN OF EVENTS’. The breakneck plot pace kept up all the way to the final page, where we find out that actually nothing was resolved at all and the ending is utter garbage. Was also able to determine that this is loosely based on the Arthurian legend, but with a focus on post-Arthur, which was written absolutely nowhere in the synopsis or otherwise.
This book is somehow both very childish and extremely gruesome at the same time, and if it grossed me out as an adult, then I really don’t know how I would have reacted if I’d read it as a teenager. It swings between memey seventeen-year-old humour and the absolute horror of sexual assault so fast I thought I was going to get whiplash. The book also has really vivid descriptions of gory demon faces for… no reason? Like, it didn’t add anything to the story and only served to further that section of writing from the meme humour only a few pages earlier. Extremely confusing and the tone throughout was not consistent in any way, or even remotely easy to keep track of.
Overall this gets a 1 for being borderline nonsensical and annoying me.
