Reviews with content warning for Death - Witching Hour

It honestly has no business being this long. The “Yes, rape me!” and the pedophilia, incest and other… uncomfortable aspects of the book were big yikes. That being said, the narrative and the plot in itself is really cool. Part 2 is a clear highlight.

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lilythegoblin's review against another edition

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Alot of instances of incest and/or pedophilia.

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cuteasamuntin's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I’m not sure I particularly liked this book. It isn’t a particularly fun or nice read, but I can already tell that it’s going to really stick with me. While it’s slow enough that I was at times impatient for Rice to get on with it, the narrative was still very compelling.

I really enjoyed the family chronology and learning more about the Talamasca. My favorite parts were 1) the deep and pure expressions of familial and romantic love dappled throughout an otherwise grim and haunting story and 2) Michael

in a joyous frenzy over restoring the house, to the point that I was hanging onto every word about his historically accurate and thoughtful renovations

, but the latter is probably just a hazard of my day job.

Funnily enough, I just didn’t care at all about the spirit Lasher, to the point that I found myself actively bored when

he is finally present in the narrative and begins interacting directly with Rowan

. I think this may have been a stronger story without that aspect being so explicitly present. This may, of course, be in part to already knowing the general principles of how spirits/“demons” work in the Anne Rice universe due to being a dedicated admirer of Maharat and her Great Family™ from The Vampire Chronicles.

For audiobook listeners, the talented Kate Reading really makes this heavy tome a lot less of a slog.

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skeptic_hecate's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

It took me forever to finish.

I will start with t he good:
The book is beautifully written, you can tell the author has a great imagination and good story telling. The lore is really well built, quite deep and interesting. The story has a lot of potential.

Now, what I didn't like:
The lore is so interesting, the life and family tree of the Mayfair witches is what kept me reading, too bad is so little and only dealt deeply for a few select chapters. The rest of the book we follow 2 very unlikable protagonists. Rowan, who is so not like other girls with a large pick me energy. Reading Rowan's thoughts only made me dislike her even more. She has this holier-than-thou attitude, she thinks she is smarter and better than everyone in the room, doesn't respect anyone, not even her (supposed) love of her life. She only thinks about sex, how everyone else is beneath her, and how smart she is. She is also very misogynistic, for absolutely no reason too, and towards every woman she encounters, dead or alive.

I can get behind a character like that, if the plot showed us that she is in the wrong. But she never is shown that, she never learns, and she is so boring to read. The second most boring character to read, the most boring character to read is Michael Curry.

I think the author was aiming for the lovable Himbo but forgot the lovable part. Not only is he widly inconsistent (a complete idiot at one point, then smarter the next page and then even more of an idiot the following chapter, only to be again somewhat smart), he is also very boring to read. We are told that he is this brave old-fashioned man who carves his own path, and shown over and over again how cowardly he acts. I wanted to skip all his parts because he is so unbelievably boring.

Aron Lightner is the best character, I love him, I wish there was more of him.

This book drags, this book is so slow, everything happens so slowly and is repeated constantly. I do not need to be spoon fed the same irrelevant information over and over again. There is so much in depth description of the house (which I actually enjoyed the first 2 or 3 times), but it gets stale after the eleventh time.

The book ending is an obvious sequel bait, too rushed, little effort and detail put, Rowan does a complete 180 personality wise. Also, the entire book reeks of the author's internalizedf misogyny. I mean the amount of hat thrown towards women who *gasp* are child free. I only wish she treated incest and rape (prominently present in her book) with the same level of disgust as a woman deciding to be child free (abortion scene and birth scene are so ironic, I cannot believe the author couldn't put two and two together).

Unless you are a die hard Anne Rice fan, don't bother with this book, read the Wikipedia summary and maybe look up a Mayfair witches family tree online and you'll be missing very little.

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