I really have to stop hoping that McFadden gets back to The Housemaid success in terms of her writing. I find myself so bored with her latter works. And now there is a blurb in the front that we won’t read about sex and other things since she wants her family to be able to read the books. Maybe that’s where things have gone wrong. This was boring from beginning to end and honestly just huge plot holes abound (per usual). Not much to say except that if you think is a horror read, it’s not even a little. If you want to read a so-so mystery, go for it though. But as a horror novel, it’s a fail and I am really annoyed it was marketed as such because I would have just gotten this via the library and not paid for it.
The Witch follows twenty something year old Julia Barlow. She’s lost her apartment and job and her father asks her to move back in with her grandmother in her more than two hundred year old sprawling home (Pemberton) in Massachusetts to keep an eye on her and also talk to someone about the house being turned into a museum. Julia has been reluctant to return to Pemberton since an unnamed incident. Having no choice, she moves back in and finds herself wondering how to help with the falling apart home, her grandmother’s failing memory, her aunt’s hostility, and the local caretaker. As Julia starts to explore the house and find out what happened to a woman who was burned at the stake for witchcraft, Caroline Eldridge. The book then shifts to following Caroline Eldridge in the late 1600s (FYI, she talks modern which drove me up the wall) and her marriage to Archibald Eldridge and the witch hysteria that started in the area and how she came to be accused of witchcraft.
The character of Julia was just a wet blanket. I just didn’t really like the entire modern storyline. It just felt off in some way. And her ‘romance’ with someone just didn’t work at all. It felt so tacked on and not really worth focusing on. And then of course, the twists we kept getting just felt off. I don’t know. The storyline following Caroline was so convoluted. I just gave up following that after a while.
The plot of Julia investigating and how Caroline gets accused as an witch just felt like it took forever. The handoff between chapters didn’t really work either. The flow was up and down throughout the book.
The ending wrapped both storylines up way too neatly and it just felt ridiculous to me anyway. McFadden is known for her endings with the twists that just come out of nowhere to wrap things up and this one just kind of faltered to an end.
