Windwitch

full review and proper formatting at https://odiumsite.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/windwitch-by-susan-dennard-a-review/

A very disappointing 2

Shockingly, Dennard manages to defy my expectations and make Windwitch worse than Truthwitch. Not because Truthwich was shockingly bad – but because Thruthwitch's best part was how exciting it made future books look. I was prepared to give Windwitch a nice 8/10 but instead Dennard has somehow managed to make the world feel smaller more constrained and failed to give her characters actual personalities.
Truthwitch's ending really left me hopeful. I was looking forward to global war and badass rescues and generally cool things. Maybe some actual character development in Merik and Safi.
Instead we get the most obvious example of middle-book-in-a-trilogy I have ever seen. Most of Truthwitch is almost completely and utterly redundant. It just drags and drags, which is a hard task for a multi-PoV book of only 400 pages. Never have I seen a book in a series more obviously created not to continue to tell a narrative, but to continue a series up to a point at which we can tell and finish a narrative.
What makes all this worse was Truthwitch set up the series to go into a completely different and actual interesting plot arc, but instead Windwitch does its best to slowly dismantle everything and in doing so also makes the previous book feel redundant. And it does this all while making the world and characters feel 2 dimensional, claustrophobic and small – even more so than Truthwitch did. Windwitch suffers from a distinct lack of identity, and does its best to destroy any identity the previous instalment conferred upon the series.
To makes matters even worse, this lack of narrative identity appears to lead to a lack of character identity. New characters to the series in book 2 don't feel like real people- more like puppets who act however the fuck Dennard felt like they should act when she woke up that morning. There is a lack of consistency and personality in many of the characters. Characters from Truthwitch feel less like actual complex living humans and more like artificial intelligence with an inconsistent personality. This excludes Aeduan and Iseult who went from middling support characters to the sole good arc in Truthwitch. Them, combined with me reading this whilst travelling from Paris to Melbourne in the course of 20-something hours, are perhaps the only reason I finished this book. They felt like the only real people in this universe and also had very compelling character development and interactions. There has also yet to be much in the way of character development outside the aforementioned duo.
Dennard's writing feels like she is trying to be more prosaic and intellectual then her writing skills allow her to be. She can't write like Patrick Rothfuss – and that's okay, because despite his somewhat simple writing style, Brandon Sanderson is my favourite writer. Please, Susan, your action scenes are somewhat indecipherable, and the supposedly profound parts are anything but. The writing isn't terrible, but it and this whole book seem to be hitting above its weight.
Also, removing Merik and Safi from their friends has made both their characters even more unbearable. Safi is just annoying as fuck and thinks she is special for some reasons. Iseult's low self-esteem was a little over the top but it's preferable to Safi. Merik is a puddle of self-loathing, poor choices all standing upon the moral high ground. I don't know whether I'll read book 3, but regardless it can't be any worse than Windwitch, can it?