Review Detail

Witchlight is the fifth and final book in the Witchland series. It has been the most swirly whirling plot, and I mean that in the best possible way. Where most books have a general goal and the plot is straightforward, perhaps with a few misdirections and betrayals along the way, as the reader, we get the general sense of a linear goal, and our characters win more than they lose to reach that conclusion.
This series is layered with intrigue. While Safi and Iseult are the main characters, the secondary, tertiary, and even further afield characters all play a part, and some are fleshed out more than others. With such a large cast, prophecies, and ancient beings coming back with ancient goals, the main characters seem to lose more than they win. Like a great ocean swell, this series has been marked by the characters being knocked off course and diverted. We as the reader watched them mature and change. All of their seeming setbacks allowed all the characters to meet and mesh, and evolve. So, I didn’t try to understand how we would get to the conclusion, and I just let the eddies of the story take me where I needed to go to absorb this massively intricate plot.
I must commend Susan Dennard on getting us to the end of the series and all the plots wrapping up in a mostly satisfying way (a couple of heart threads didn’t make it!). There were deaths, some permanent and many not, thanks to the magic system in place. Given the number of years it has taken to conclude the series, I highly recommend rereading to fully remember everyone and everything that has happened, especially the novella, Sightwitch.
This series does a nice job of staying in the YA genre. The characters have love interests, but there are no scenes that would make it unsuitable for YA audiences. Only due to its intricacy and length of the books would I recommend it for an older YA audience.
I read the book with a physical copy and an audiobook. The narrator does a nice job with accents and speech patterns to help keep the main characters unique. I will say that structurally, the book flows to different characters without much warning, so that a couple of times in the audiobook, I had to go back or listen intently to catch the switch in perspective that the physical book with paragraph spaces was easier to see. Overall, Witchland fans will be excited to see how it all concludes.