This book is third in a series. I read book one in 2017 and book two in 2018. So I have been away from this world and these characters for a long time. I almost didn’t read this book just because it has been so long and I wasn’t sure if bumbling in confusion through a story just for the sake of saying I completed a series was worth it. But I finally decided to check the book out from the library and at least give it a try. Worst comes to worst, I could not finish it and say I gave it my best effort. 

I will give Wayward Witch a lot of credit here: Despite having not touched anything Brooklyn Brujas for six years, it actually was not that hard to catch up with the story and the relevant events from previous books. Some of that is because this book follows Rose, who wasn’t a major participant in much of the earlier books (she spent the entirety of book one stuck in a tree, for example). So she was aware of the events, but mostly didn’t directly experience them. And some of that is because the narrative itself did a spectacular job gently reminding me of the relevant context. I know I’ve still forgotten most of the details, but between what I remembered, what the narrative reminded me about, and the things I was able to infer between what the narrative told me and the characters’ actions, I quickly got enough of the big picture to be able to follow the emotional arcs of the story. 

Perhaps it’s the missing details, though, that would have made this story feel solid and complete. Whatever the reason, I had a lot of problems with this book. The world is fascinating – like Labyrinth Lost, most of it takes place in a supernatural realm separated from our own where a Mortiz sister has to do some heroics to save the day. In this case, it’s Adas, land of the fairies. Of course, these are the tall, unfeeling, practically immortal type of fairy, and they need her unique kind of magic to help them them stop a terrible destructive force. It’s engaging, full of strange peoples and weird creatures and breathtaking scenery and fae people just strange enough to feel unnerving. Honestly, I would be happy to spend more time in Adas. 

But everything else about the book feels jumbled together and lacks coherence. If you look at the beginning of the book versus the end, Rose appears to have gone on some deep emotional journey about accepting her unusual brand of magic and forgiving her father. But it must have happened off-page, because I didn’t see any actual emotional journey of any kind happening (unless you count the one scene where she accidentally gets dosed with magic truth serum and talks about all the things she’s scared of). 

The plot on the whole was reasonable and the twist was great and came as a surprise. But nothing else seemed to fit. Rose, and sometimes other characters, would react logically to some things and severely under-react to others. The relationships between Rose and the other people she was traveling with seemed to swing between cordial and mildly hostile for no discernable reason – it certainly doesn’t seem to be anything Rose does, because at one point she does something that I would have expected to make her Group Enemy #1, but nobody ever mentions it again. (There are also a few copyediting errors – mistaken capitalization, “thing” instead of “think,” etc. – that reduced my confidence in the whole thing.) 

Honestly, it was fine. There were definitely issues, but none of them made the story unreadable. I finished the book, and I actually enjoyed much of it. But it does have a feeling of being written not so much because the author felt like each Mortiz sister had to have her own book, but because the author signed a contract for three books so had to write a third book. There were some good bones in this story, but it really needed a lot more focus and a lot more work on what exactly these characters were doing here. I liked it for the most part, but it felt like a weak ending to what I recall being a pretty solid series in previous books.