📕 Title: A Resistance of Witches
✏️ Author: Morgan Ryan
📖 Genre: Historical Fantasy
⭐ Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
📝 Debut Author
 
BOOK BLURB

When a coven of British witches decides to join the war effort, young witch named Lydia is tasked with retrieving magical relics before they end up in Hitler’s hands. But when a Nazi witch infiltrates their coven and murders their grand mistress, the coven is divided about continuing to support the government. Lydia, determined to continue fighting, takes on one last assignment: to retrieve the Grimorium Bellum, a powerful book of magic, before the Witches of the Third Reich can find it.

REVIEW

Thank you to the publisher for the free copy of this book!

Based on the title I thought this story would be about a coven of witches fighting Nazis and while there are some interesting coven politics, ultimately it’s mostly about a single witch: Lydia.

I do like Lydia as a character because she is flawed and tenacious, though other than being a witch her background isn’t especially interesting. The majority of the book revolves around Lydia’s quest to find the Grimorium Bellum, which unfortunately wasn’t all that compelling. Although it’s supposed to be a solo mission, she picks up two allies up along the way: Henry, a Haitian-American man and an art curator, and Rebecca, a lesbian Jew and resistance spy—neither of whom are witches. Despite this, Rebecca and Henry were far more interesting characters and more fleshed out than the coven witches. Still, this meant that there wasn’t as much magic in the story as I had expected, and at times it felt like a slog (and they spend a lot of time being captured).

There is light romance between Lydia and Henry but it’s a very minor part of the story. This book might be a good fit for readers who are not big fans of romance.

It was disappointing that there weren’t many instances of Lydia working with other witches in her coven and I wish Lydia would’ve had better relationships with them. She doesn’t seem particularly close with other witches aside from the few who die very early into the story, so there is little development of those relationships. One of the stronger aspects of this book was Lydia’s relationship arc with her mother.

While I didn’t find this book to be groundbreaking or particularly noteworthy, I wouldn’t write off this author given that this is her debut novel. It’s still a good book and may appeal more to other readers who have different tastes than me.