Waking the Witch: Contrived setting, but enjoyable series

Waking the Witch by Kelley Armstrong

Waking the Witch by Kelley Armstrong is a fine addition to the Women of the Otherworld series. It relays the adventures of Savannah Levine, whom we met as a precocious orphan in earlier novels and who is now a grown woman. The mystery is strong, compelling, and reasonably twisted; the plot is well paced and packed with action; and the characters and their stories are, as always, strong. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the novel.

What’s not to like? Well, to be brutally honest, while I enjoy reading the novels of Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, the world setting has always struck me as a bit contrived. For instance, when female witches have children with male sorcerers (protagonist Savannah is unique as the only such offspring we know of), their offspring clearly have a huge power advantage over witch-only or sorcerer-only babies. And yet witches and sorcerers do not procreate, supposedly because of a history of enmity and war. And this is true despite the fact that sorcerers (always male) are cruel and powerful enough to force themselves on the less powerful witches. Too, I don’t really buy into Armstrong’s explanation of why there is only one female werewolf in this world.

If these types of small issues with world setting distract you as a reader, then this may not be the series for you. But if you enjoy good stories about memorable characters, then I would recommend this series and this book. Waking the Witch is self contained enough that you can enjoy it even if it is your first introduction to Armstrong’s Otherworld.

Women of the Otherworld — (Began in 2001) Publisher: An addictive, deeply enjoyable thrill ride on the frontier of the feral and feminine… a debut novel of astonishing imaginative power from the future queen of suspense. Elena Michaels slips out of bed, careful not to wake her boyfriend. He hates it when she disappears in the middle of the night, and can’t understand why any normal woman would crave the small hours of the morning, the dark unsafe downtown streets. But Elena’s skin is tingling, the pent-up energy feels like it’s about to blow her muscles apart — she can’t put it off any longer. She loves to run at the edge of the city, but she doesn’t have time to get there. She has to slink into an alley, take off her clothes and hide them carefully, and make the Change. Elena’s trying hard to be normal. She hates her strength, and her wildness, and her hunger for food, for sex, for running in the night, for the chase and the kill. She wants a husband, children… even a mother-in-law. Or at least that’s what she tells herself. And then the inevitable happens. The Pack needs her. The Pack she loves and hates is under siege from a bunch of disreputable and ruthless mutts who are threatening to expose them all, breaking all the rules that have kept them safe. The loyalty of her nature calls her home, and into the fight, which tests just who Elena is: the wild woman or the wistful would-be human.