Dual pov ! Friends to enemies to more !

An incredible story about isolation , loneliness , family, loss and preservation.

This was for me, unfortunately, a DNF. I really wanted to love this story, the cover is gorgeous and the premise of the book is enthralling. I can't really say why I couldn't get into this story, as there was nothing wrong with the story. It just didn't suck me in. I've seen other reviews for this book and maybe I'll come back at another time and it will hit differently. This story, unfortunately, didn't hook me and I couldn't stick with it.

I was provided print and an audio ARC of this book via Netgalley, all opinions are my own.

This is a queer retelling of Rapunzel, which I don't think I knew when I requested this. You don't often see Rapunzel retellings, though I have seen a few pop up recently. All I knew going in that this was a queer fantasy with witches and vampires, I didn't really need any more to entice me. I do love a good retelling though. It has been a while since I've read the original Rapunzel, but I get the correlation. The action and adventure parts more closely resemble the movie Tangled, which to be fair is probably the version of Rapunzel that people are most familiar with.

This follows former best friends Ava and Kaye who are both witches, except Ava is a vampire and Kaye is a vampire hunter in training. Kaye's mother was killed on the same night Ava disappeared (the night she was turned), and they haven't spoken in years. Ava has been held prisoner by her mother and her creepy husband, but she's had enough. She is determined to escape and seek refuge with the Vampire Queen. Meanwhile Kaye is doing everything she can to prove herself worthy of being a Flame Witch and hunter. On the night Ava escapes, Kaye catches up to her and the two of them embark on a journey of self-discovery they didn't intend on. Kaye has been taught to believe that vampires are only mindless killers, but Ava proves her wrong at every turn. Together they must work together to fight against more dangerous beings and face devastating betrayals if they want to survive.

I really enjoyed the enemies to lovers, slow burn romance. The romance is really clean so it is perfect for young adult readers. There are vampires so there is blood. While there aren't particularly graphic or gory scenes, there are vampires doing their thing and several fight scenes between the vampires and the witches so if that isn't your thing I'd steer clear. The world building could have been a bit more detailed. I find that the fast pace and the action packed scenes made up for that. The story was entertaining and the romance wasn't over the top. It is fairly slow burn as the friends reestablish trust in one another

I really enjoyed the audiobook version of this. I flipped between the ebook and the audiobook, but I put in the most time on the audiobook. I enjoyed both of the narrators and felt they did a good job brining Ava and Kaye, as well as the rest of the characters to life. They brought emotion into the story where it belonged and I could feel the tension between the girls as the story progressed.

I felt the ending was a rushed. Things came together really quickly at the end and I felt like it really needed a few more chapters for it to be flushed out. While the ending was conclusive, it was a bit open ended. I did get the feeling of closure, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of Ava and Kaye in the future.

Overall, I loved this. I didn't want to put this down once I picked it up.

Absolutely loved this, every single page, I was sad when it ended because I just wanted to keep on reading still. The world building, the representation, the writing, everything was just fantastic , such a wonderful read, likeable and well developed characters , a story you will not want to put down. Enemies to lovers, slow burn, vampires and witches, if one of those things doesn’t entice you in, I’m not sure we can be friends. You really do need to read this.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Well wasn’t it cute.
I liked it, but I think I was expecting more romance, therefore, it left me wanting me more. Kaye & Ava were definitely cute to read, I mean, despite this being fantasy it was a light read and it didn’t bore you with unnecessary descriptions or anything, it’s easy to follow through.
By the way, the entire concept of witches plus the elements etc intrigued me a lot! I don’t know, I got a lot of cottage core vibes do’t ask me why lol so yeah it was fun. I wanted more romance, but everything else I definitely enjoyed.
I’d like to thank NetGalley and Wednesday Books for the opportunity to read this ARC.

This was a 3.5 star read for me. I rounded it up because I really did enjoy the fantasy world that the author wove for us. While the story is most definitely fantasy, it does have parallels to the real world. Two different fantastical creatures (witches and vampires) and the humans who live among them. We see in the story how these two very different "cultures" clash consistently with both trying to take the others out. Ana's mom wants to let loose to take over their world and Kaye's mother finds the truth and is silenced for that truth. It is a "retelling" but it is a very loose retelling. It is a queer story and in the end...love is love whether it is two women, two men or a Witch and a Vampire.

The Witch and the Vampire is a sapphic Rapunzel retelling where former friends must band together and take a tumultuous journey through a cursed forest. Ava and Kaye were both witches until vampires broke through a magical barrier protecting their hometown, killing Kaye’s mother and turning Ava into a vampire.

Ava’s mother, Eugenia, decided the best course was to trap Ava in their family home so she could steal her daughter’s powers to cover up the fact that she is also a vampire. After two years of imprisonment, Ava’s had enough. She decides to break out and find help from vampires who live in the forest.

Kaye is a flame witch who blames Ava for her mother’s death. All she wants to do is kill vampires and get revenge. Kaye witnesses Ava’s escape and seizes the opportunity by following Ava. She manipulates the situation by encouraging Ava to travel with her, but Kaye plans on betraying Ava by turning her in once they reach their destination.

Ava is none the wiser because she still wants to be friends with Kaye and maybe become something more. But Kaye is adamant about her disdain for Ava’s new vampiric ways.

As the two travel, they encounter danger at every step, from trees that devour humans to Ava’s evil stepfather. Kaye sees Ava might not be the evil creature she once presumed, and Ava learns that Kaye has valid reasons to distrust her. They can work together to escape the forest safely.

The book’s greatest strength is its spooky atmosphere. Sometimes I felt like I was in the forest with Ava and Kaye. Although the pacing is slow, it feels intentional until the last ten percent. The ending felt a little rushed. Unfortunately, the characters were sometimes grating, and I don’t think it’s because they were teenagers.

I noticed some inconsistencies in how the magic system worked, so it would have been nice to see it become a little more fleshed out within the story. It seemed too easy for one of the characters to gain power. And although we learned about flame and root witches, more background information would have helped the story, and maybe it wouldn’t have felt quite as slow as it did.

I’m unsure how much the author knows about blood libel, but it’s an antisemitic trope often used in media, especially vampire stories. I’m not an expert, but I can see how the other reviewers made that connection. There’s room for a more extensive conversation about vampires in media and how to portray them without perpetuating real-world stereotypes. I don’t have the answers, but please proceed with caution if you are interested in this book.

The book’s cover is gorgeous, and Bailey Carr is one of my favorite audiobook narrators, but that’s not enough for me to wholeheartedly recommend The Witch and the Vampire.

Thank you to NetGalley, Wednesday Books, and Dreamscape Media for providing digital and audio advance reader copies in exchange for my honest review of The Witch and the Vampire.

I wanted to love this book, and it started off pretty strong, I thought. But by the end I was so confused I kept having to flip back to earlier in the chapter (or sometimes the chapter before) to try to find the context for what was happening--I was so lost I couldn't enjoy roughly the last 1/4-1/3 of the book. Up until that point, though, I mostly really liked it.

Ava had been a vampire for the past two years, locked in her house by her mother--a witch, who's stealing Ava's own witch powers.
Kaye has been training to fight vampires. And, certain that Ava is the vampire who killed her mother, is set on revenge.
When the two find each other in the woods, they realize they can use each other for their own ends. But their old friendship hangs between them, and as time goes on they begin to realize that they might still have more in common than they thought. Still, Ava needs to feed, and Kaye needs vengeance for her mother's death.

I loved the concept of this book, and I really appreciated the fact that the enemies portion of the enemies to lover arc was actually deserving of the word enemies--they fight, they almost kill each other, and it's clear that Kaye, at least, truly does hate Ava,

One of my issues early on is that it's clear Ava has never been at full strength--but it doesn't really seem to affect her. She's basically been starved for the past two years, and her thirst is a focus of her POV chapters, but it doesn't seem to actually come with any real negative effects--it doesn't slow her down much, she's still able to heal--she's even able to heal Kaye. She also focuses a lot on how her mother stealing her powers weakens her--but then displays great enough control over her magic that everyone is impressed by it.
There's also a lot of information that I felt like we got the wrong amount of--a lot of times, I would have been happy with more OR less, but the amount we got was enough to make me curious but not give me enough of an answer to satisfy me, so I was left wanting more, and not necessarily in a good way.
Toward the end, there's a lot of information Ava just seems to know, some of which I'm really not sure how she figured out, some of which is alluded to (for example, there's a conversation that happens off-page that I really felt like I needed to actually see).

Overall, I liked the concept, I liked the characters (Ava and Kaye were flawed in ways that really rounded them out and made them and their relationship feel very real), but I wish the ending had been a bit more drawn out, so we could have gone a little deeper into the characters' motivations, the conversations happening, etc. I think if the climax-ending had been about 50 pages longer this could have been a 4 star read for me.

This is the first Rapunzel retelling that I have ever read, and it's Sapphic so that is amazing. The book pulled me in from the first page. There were times in the book that moved really slow for me. There were also some confused moments about how the Vampire's are in this story. I am very happy that I got to read it still. The premise of this book is amazing. Also the cover is one of my favorite covers of the year. I will be recommending this book to my friends who like retellings.

This is a stand-alone YA fantasy novel with a romance subplot. It goes back and forth between the POVs of Ava, a vampire and root witch, and Kaye, a flame witch tasked with exterminating vampires to protect her town.
Everything changed for Ava and Kaye two years ago when Ava was forcibly changed into a vampire by her mother and Kaye’s mother was murdered by a vampire. Since then, Ava has been locked in the attic of her family home while Kaye has been training with her fellow flames and trying to redeem herself from her mother’s past as a traitor.
Now, Ava is making her escape to the forest, bent on finding the vampire queen to warn her of her mother’s sinister plans. Meanwhile, Kaye, with hate in her heart, is waiting for her chance to avenger her mothers death by killing her murderer, who she is convinced is Ava. When Ava flees, Kaye follows. Will they be able to get over their differences, or will they fall to hate and ignorance?

Romeo and Juliet but make it sapphic!!

Ava and Kaye are estranged best friends, to enemies, to forbidden lovers. In a world where vampires and flame witches are separated (literally by a bone wall) Ava and Kaye are torn apart. They don’t know if they should love each other or hate each other for their inherent differences. Which side do they choose? Love, family, or destiny?

Enemies to lovers is always a fave for me. This book was so intense and magical. The second half had me reading so fast to find out what happened next. It even made me a little bit emotional.

Wow this was just such a disappointment.

First off I just want to say this is being marketed as a Rapunzel retelling but I would say that is definitely not true, so don't pick this up thinking that is what you are going to get. There are like nods to Rapunzel at the beginning with the main character being locked in a tower with super long hair, but she escapes that tower fairly quickly (which is mentioned in the blurb so I don't think that's a spoiler).

This book was a case of having good ideas at its core, but that fell apart once those ideas were fleshed out into a book. If you had given me a several page outline that just told me what was going to happen in this book I would have thought it sounded like a good story. But once it was expanded into an actual book it fell totally flat

The characters themselves were not well done and I didn't particularly care much about either of our main characters. Their voices were identical which got confusing a few times in the alternating POVs. Ava comes off as incredibly naive which would have made sense if she had spent her entire life in this tower, but she had only spent years 2 years there after she spent 16 in the normal world so I didn't find this characterization of her to make much sense. She also goes through a lot of trauma at the hands of her mother and stepfather and it's mentioned as a thing that happens....and that's it. There really aren't any consequences of that and it's all rather flippant as if she just wanted to throw it in to make her YA book edgier.

Kaye was also just not likable and incredibly wishy washy in her decisions and feelings especially towards Ava. She starts off the book 100% convinced Ava is the cause of something bad that had happened despite having no evidence of it, and then from there she just keeps flip flopping her opinion on this and other things. It made her feel like she had no characterization because anytime you thought you might have figured out why she felt a certain way and thus were starting to get to know her as a character, she would change her mind with no explanation and it undermined any attempts of deepening her character that there was.

I'll briefly touch on the romance as well since this is being marketed as a sapphic story. There was no romance. If you took out the single page in which they briefly kissed then you would not have been able to tell the author ever intended any romance in this book. I have never read a more underdeveloped romance in my life. A lot of it seemed to be based on the idea that the girls grew up really close so they had that bond already formed from before the book started to grow on instead of growing a bond from nothing. But we never saw any scenes or anything about this time of them being close friends so that bond was never built to the reader. And they didn't have any chemistry to speak of in this book, something definitely not helped by the wishy washiness of Kaye's character towards Ava.

Beyond characters this book was the perfect example of telling now showing because I swear every single piece of information in this book was told and literally nothing was shown. It was incredibly aggravating to read after a while. There were scenes that I think were supposed to have more of an impact on the reader and on developing parts of the story that just totally fell flat because it felt like there was no "proof" behind the telling backing up what we were being told. And this also caused the motivations behind the decisions of the bad guys in this book to make no sense. We are told they're doing x thing, but not shown any reason why they want that thing to happen which just made the climax of the book kind of confusing because it felt like nothing made sense.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, there were some concepts that I thought had potential and I was interested in finding out more about. I was intrigued by the different types of witches that were touched upon in this story. I also thought the whole bone wall thing was intriguing. And I wish those ideas had just been put in the hands of someone better able to flesh them out into a good book. I did also find this to be compulsively readable as a book. I was not dragging my feet trying to finish it at any point so it had that going for it as well

This was one of my highly anticipated March 2023 releases, and unfortunately it fell so short for me. The premise was promising! A young witch turned Vampire, escapes her imprisonment at home to find the Queen of Vampires Cassiopea. A young Fire witch who wants to get revenge for her murdered mother, finds Ava and tricks her to taking her to where she will find Cassiopea, yet they fall in love again. Except there was barely even any G rated love. So many of these concepts seemed incredibly cool, but the execution just wasn’t there. Also, the ending was extremely abrupt!

I hope others find what a I was looking for in this YA sapphic fantasy romance, but unfortunately this really did not do it for me.

As lackluster as the title. Pitched as a queer Rapunzel retelling, The Witch and The Vampire is yet another retelling that fails at breathing fresh life into the source material. This story may have been written to appeal to YA audiences on the younger side, but the gratuitous info-dumping, shallow characterizations and prose that told rather than showed all together would deter even the hardiest of young reader. The author clearly tried to integrate the deeper themes of abusive mothers, loss of innocence and being a minority, but due to them not being properly developed this integration failed.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review .

Thank you to Netgalley, St Martin's Press, and Wednesday Books for the eARC so that I could leave an honest review.

This was a tough one. I was SO incredibly excited for this Sapphic retelling of Rapunzel. And what a beautiful cover, seriously. I really wish I'd loved it. However, I think both the Sapphic romance aspect and the Rapunzel aspects were pretty minimal.

The writing was a bit clumsy at times and seemed to trend towards the younger side of YA. Other reviewers have mentioned that the author 'tells rather than shows', which is true. And sometimes, there was both telling and showing to really hammer it home. Events in this story seem to just happen because it's best for the plot and the logic center of my brain was not able to let that go. Characters show up in places or know information because 'plot reasons' quite often. Kaye knows her former friend is a vampire because she glanced up at her room one time and Ava had blood all over her chin. I also don't completely understand why Ava is a plant witch AND a vampire just because she's young?

The two POVs of Ava and Kaye were incredibly similar and I often forgot who was narrating the chapter I was reading. The friendship between these two characters was completely in the past and they're enemies throughout most of the story, so it didn't really feel that compelling. The morality and beliefs of the characters are all over the place and their convictions are very wishy-washy. The magic system was a little fast and loose (Fire witches can also bend light to be invisible?) but the world-building was interesting. Interesting idea overall, but I certainly had some qualms with it.

This book description has great potential and sounded very interesting, but the book did not live up to it. It was written in a very confusing and nondirect way. Things are unclear from the beginning. Is she a witch or vampire? Both? Her mother wants to kill the vampires, but isn't she one?

This book sadly was not for me. It fell flat and I lost interest close to the end. It started off pretty strong, but once Ana and Kaye got together to travel through the woods is when it really started going south for me.

The story had a lot of telling and not showing. There seemed to be no world building and the characters weren’t entertaining and felt very bland. I didn’t find anything interested about them.

This story had potential, but it just did not feel developed out enough.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press, Wednesday Books, and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Witch and the Vampire is a YA fantasy with a sapphic childhood best friends to enemies to lovers romance. It follows Ava, a vampire and Root witch, and Kaye, a Flame witch trained to hunt down vampires. Forced to work together, they journey together through a dangerous forest and learn to trust each other as they start to question everything they’ve been told.

This is a solid YA fantasy with a sweet sapphic romance! The description compares it to Rapunzel and while I did see the similarities, I wouldn't pick it up only based on wanting to read a Rapunzel retelling. I think the Rapunzel comparison comes from Ava being locked in her house by her mother so she can steal Ava’s Root witch magic. However, very little time is spent with Ava trapped in the house and after she escapes, I think this is where it doesn’t really seem like a retelling. This didn’t really bother me, and didn’t impact my rating, but I think the Rapunzel comparison isn’t the most accurate. I liked the world building and the magic system and I think it set up the world well. I’m not sure if this is a series or not, but if it is, I’d like to see how the rest of the world deals with vampires. I also really liked the characters of Ava and Kaye. They felt flushed out and well-developed. Both Ava and Kaye read fairly young, which isn’t a criticism at all, since this book seems to be marketed as younger YA, something that I think is very needed as YA books seem to skew more and more adult in tone and content. They felt accurate to the ages they’re supposed to be, but it’s something to keep in mind for anyone who prefers to read older YA. One of the only issues I had with this book was that I had a hard time with the geography of the town and forest. I didn’t have a good sense of how far the characters were any of the towns of landmarks mentioned. This book would have really benefitted from a map being included. There may be one included in the physical copy, but I don’t know since there wasn’t one in the eARC. Overall, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to fans of younger YA fantasy books with sapphic romances that.

Between the run on sentences and the first person point of view where the author had the character tell me literally everything she did, I couldn't make it through even 25% of this book.

The premise of the book was very promising: a sapphic story with witches and vampires. I was excited but right from the start the bad writing left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like I was watching a really bad movie with a horrible script and bad actors. I could barely get through this one.

Thanks NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!