Siavahda's Reviews > The Honey Witch

The Honey Witch is…aggressively fine. But it rubbed me the wrong way almost from the start; the story almost falls over itself it moves so fast, rushing as if trying to get itself over with. A story about honey-magic makes me expect lush, soft prose, and languorous pacing, but that is absolutely not what we have here; seriously, what is the damn rush? The dialogue is stilted and false, with random shifts in topic and passionate reactions that come out of nowhere and seem massively disproportionate. And rather than letting us slowly and deliciously discover this world bit by bit, Shields beats us about the head with clunky info-dumping.

There are moments of brilliance – especially in the opening chapters, Shields occasionally gives us a line that really sparkles;

what is so wrong about being a bitch? It is the closest a girl can be to a wolf.

But these are few and far between. There’s quite a bit of preaching, most of it shoehorned in where there really isn’t room for it; for example, early on there’s a passage where, out of nowhere, Marigold starts thinking about ‘the world’s penchant for beautiful, dead girls’. Cue a rambly aside on how society prefers girls die young and pretty rather than grow old and…become witches? Like, this is a genuine issue (well, maybe not the witchy part, in this day and age) but the lecture is coming completely out of left field; nothing in the chapter up to this point had anything to do with this topic. It’s not a tough subject being examined by the narrative; it’s Shields grandstanding, and not being even the tiniest bit subtle about it.

Then there’s the worldbuilding, which, hoo boy. So the whole honey-witches-can’t-fall-in-love thing???

She cursed us to never have anyone fall in love with us in an attempt to end us.

The curse isn’t a punishment, or intended to inflict suffering – the goal was to end the bloodline of honey witches. What??? Uh, does someone need to explain to Shields that love isn’t a required part of the recipe for having a child??? How in the gods’ names does cursing you to never have true love equal a family dying out???

Except no, Shields is well aware; not only did Marigold’s grandmother have a child without love, she had a child without a partner at all. She literally made a baby with magic, all by herself.

HI. IF THAT’S A THING WITCHES CAN DO…WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE DAMN CURSE???

It annoys the hell out of me both because it’s just stupid, and because it would have cost Shields nothing to change the motivation of the witch who cast the curse. Say she wanted this family to suffer! Say she did it out of vengeance or sadism or anger or whatever. But if her goal was to end her enemy’s bloodline, the curse is completely pointless.

Does Shields require the curse for plot? Yes. So keep the curse, but come up with some kind of reasonable backstory for it, for crying out loud. It’s not hard.

Then there’s the whole nonsense about how, just like water is the opposite of fire, and air the opposite of earth…honey is the opposite of ashes.

No.

Sorry, but. No.

Again: completely and utterly unnecessary. All you had to say was, these are the two kinds of magic, honey magic and ash magic. Ta da! You didn’t need to set them up as some kind of elemental opposites. Because now you just sound confusing and stupid.

Why is this like this???

And I don’t even want to talk about how the whole ‘Marigold, you’re a witch’ thing went down, with her mother screaming at her grandmother and being The Most Dramatic and I could not stop cringing at all of it.

The Honey Witch just…really isn’t what it’s being marketed as. The book starts with Marigold – in a Regency-esque time period – not having fun at a ball, which, fair. But the whole first 20% is just this…not-that-subtly anti-men, anti-marriage spiel, which, somewhat fair, but Shields really shoves it down your throat. Marigold is The Most Special because she goes and dances in the rain and meets up with magic butterflies rather than looking for a husband, and all of this with the fast-forward button on, and the info-dumping, and dialogue like…like I don’t even know what. Like a badly written script being performed by very bad actors. And not just info-dumping, but telling-telling-telling, recounting the past for us at light-speed so we know how all the relationships work, because we certainly don’t get a chance to get a feel for those relationships ourselves. There’s no emotional development at all, and then the grandmother whisks Marigold away to start her new life as a witch.

I was expecting – and wanted – languid storytelling, cosy and sweet, with pretty prose and a grumpy/sunshine romance. Instead, I got choppy writing, an origin story we didn’t need (seriously, it would have saved so much cringing if the story had opened with Marigold on Innisfree instead of the headless chicken that was the glimpse of her home life), insultingly stupid worldbuilding, and a book that just can’t figure out how to slow down. Did someone hand Shields back her manuscript and tell her she had to cut 300 pages or something? Because that’s almost what it feels like, a story crammed into fewer pages than it needs.

Reading The Honey Witch was like wearing the worst scratchy wool you can think of; it just itched, and it’s such a relief to call it quits and not have to deal with it any more. THANK YOU BUT NO.