I hate to do that, since I really enjoyed other books by the author, but I read 16% and I am abandoning the book for now. It's not working for me. Maybe I'll try again in another moment

3.5 stars
This book started off a little rocky for me. I was so confused with how the magic worked and what was happening I had to start over after about 25 pages. Once I did that though everything clicked and I sped through. Despite that initial issue I ended up really enjoying it. I loved the characters and the general concept. However I did find the pacing strange. The jumping back and forth between past and present didn’t really work for me some of the times. Mostly I got lost when it came to the overall structure of the world a few times. But again I love the way the characters were written and the writing in general is fantastic.

“Witches are here, witches are with us”
A tale of found family set in a complex and intricate world-building, this story takes some time to get into, particularly with the change in timelines between chapters which can especially be confusing at the beginning of the book. I would have preferred faster pacing with this, as at times, it felt somewhat dragged out unnecessarily. The characters were interesting and their relationships, heartwarming with their loyalty and determination to find one of their own, unflagging. You find yourself invested in the search and to understand why they were captured in the first place. That being said, this was not the book for me unfortunately as I need books with faster pacing and more happening. I may be used to simpler world-building but this complexity slowed down my reading and made me reluctant to pick this up.
Pick this up if you are a fan of intricate worlds and complex magic systems and for an ending that is quite unexpected, similar to Piranesi.

This book has so much potential. However, it’s really hard to get into because the back and forth between the past and present timeline while trying to learn who the various characters are and how the magic system and their world works is a lot. It was hard for me to keep track of what was going on and I struggled to get into the story because of it.
I ended up DNF at 20%.
I think if you have the time to really focus and maybe take notes while reading to keep track of everything, or perhaps have a physical copy of the book in hand where you can easily refer back to the character reference at the beginning of the book it may be an easier read.

I do think it’s a good read for those that love expansive world building and it has diverse LGBTQIA+ representation in it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for the copy of this eARC.

Hankering for an epic fantasy with a sweeping but somehow still intimate scope, deeply compelling characters and relationships, and delightfully original worldbuilding? WITCH KING does all this and more, and I can’t recommend it enthusiastically enough!

It’s got found family! It’s got a witch on a quest to find her wife! It’s got fascinating magic systems and fantasy societies! It’s got a “drop you in and let you figure it out as you go” approach! It’s got a main character who is both actually queer, and also experiences isolation and alienation in the ways that many queer fantasy readers identify with, unrelated to his queerness! It’s got politics in moderate doses! It’s got a great balance of two separate storylines (a past and a present)! It’s got so much atmosphere!

In short, Martha Wells has taken basically everything I look for in a fantasy read, and fitted each of these pieces together like it’s effortless. Truly I have nothing bad to say about this book, except that I wanted it to be longer. And it was already decently long. (Failing that, I badly want more books set in this world — there is SO much left to explore, and I want to spend more time with all of the characters and dig even further into the wildly creative worldbuilding!)

Thank you so so so much to Tor and Netgalley for the ARC; I’m SO thrilled I got to read this one early! WITCH KING comes out 5/30, and I highly, highly recommend it.

Dearests, 5+ seems like it will become a category of its own, “Utter perfection with a sprinkle of marvelousness”.

What a fantastic piece of literature that combines modern elements of literature with older elements of high fantasy. Perfectly paced, told & unveiled. This could be a standalone BUT I MUST see the Hierarchs destroyed!

@illumicrate @owlcrate @fairyloot I will await your special editions before purchasing this in hardback. Thanker.

𝗠𝘆 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: THE Witch King
𝗙𝗮𝘃 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿: A L L 😍
𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆: E A S Y
𝗧𝘆𝗽𝗲: Novel
𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗿𝗲: High fantasy adventure😍
5+/𝟱

🌱THE EXCELLENT
~ Perfect pacing, patient unravelling, delicious fighting scenes
~ Mariners, dead body possession & different types of magic
~ “I’m not going to eat you, we’re friends”
~ Evolving mystery in fantastic world that we are thrown into 😍

Kai is a demon prince who has been travelling the world with his companions since his first mortal body was destroyed after leaving the plains of the Saredi…. that is, until he awakes after being entombed a la sleeping beauty. Clearly SOMEONEs have made terrible choices & they must be reminded that when you fkkk around with the Witch King, you ALWAYS find out. 😏

✨𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱.

🌱THE MEH
~ I need the next book N O W 🥲

Kai wakes up in a watery tomb with an expositor trying to use him as a power source. After inhabiting a recently killed body, Kai took out the expositor and his team, then rescued Ziede from her own tomb. Then they were off on a quest to figure out what happened before they ended up in the tomb and find Ziede's wife. Tahren. Martha Wells provides the backstory by running a parallel story line set in the past that highlights how Kai, Ziede, and Tahren became friends and work together. Working the two story lines, Wells keeps the anticipation level high and makes the book an enjoyable read! Definitely not Murderbot, but a very fun tale set in an interesting universe.

Thanks Netgalley for the chance to read this story!

Witch King is one of those books where you're dropped straight into the middle of the plot and the reader spends a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on. The premise is intriguing, though I was more interested in some of the side characters, like Ziede, instead of the main character, Kai. The book spends each chapter alternating between the present and the past. The problem is that, by the end of the book, I still don't understand what a Hierarch or expostior or Immortal Marshall is and what the difference is between all of them. I know there is an invasion, but am still fuzzy on the back story. It felt a little like I was reading a second book in a series instead of the first. The writing, as always, is great but the plot was hard to keep track of. As much as I wanted to love it, it just didn't hit quite right for me.

3.5 stars
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

I picked this book up because I love Martha Wells murder-bot series...a lot. It's quick. It's witty. It's sarcastic and clever. This book isn't Murder-bot.

I sometimes struggle with fantasy featuring a fully developed world building where the reader is dropped in the middle of a story which has a complex history and geography and has to figure out who fits where and why events are occurring as they read, so I'm willing to concede that part of my review could be a poor reader match.

My other struggle is that this book is a very slow burn with little character development. The front end stagnation is going to deter many readers, and was a challenge for me as well. While the characters are interesting enough that I'll probably read the second installment, I want to know more about all of them beyond what they are doing or have done. Motivation and internal monologue are almost non-existant in this story and it leaves it feeling a bit flat.

My best advice is reader beware. Just because you like Murder-bot, doesn't mean this book is for you.

This is a standalone(?) adult fantasy in with we follow Kai, a demon, and Ziede, a witch, after they wake up in a prison and pieces together what happened.

This story uses the parallell timeline trope to tell it's story, a trope that I typically don't like. It still worked for me since the timelines didn't blend together, I never felt as if I was interrupted and had to go back to the "boring" timeline. The different timelines does make the story move more slowly though, at least for me, but I was still enjoying myself.

I loved the characters. To follow Kai in the different timelines, one in which he has control over himself and one where most things are new, made me feel a lot more connected to his story. Ziede with her sarcasm was brilliant and I really liked the take on witchcraft.

I will end by saying that I'm a huge Murderbot fan and my glee when I was approved for this ARC can't really be explained in a written way. However, if you love the Murderbot diaries because of the fast pacing, this might not be for you.

Recived this as a review copy from Netgalley.

DNF at 50%. There's a lot of potential here, but unfortunately I'm mostly finding myself confused and not engaged. Perhaps I picked this up at the wrong time.

Pros: queernorm and non-binary world, thorough world building, interesting magic

Cons: at times felt tedious (like I needed to take notes to keep everything straight), breakneck pacing, not much breathing room in the plot

I'm deciding to put it down because it's not the book I want to pick up when I sit down to read. I think it's just not for me. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys super fast paced plot-focused books, super heavy worldbuiling, and soft magic systems.

thanks to netgalley for providing an e-arc of this book !
Witch King was one of my most anticipated releases of the year and I was sadly disappointed
The beginning made absolutely no sense to me and I thought was supposed to have read another of her book before, to understand this one. There is an alternance of past and present events.
I wanted to dnf it at first, but after the 10% mark it got better.
The lore of the book is very very vast and without a map it was quite difficult to understand because you are thrown in and expected to understand it. The magic system is also very interesting but confusing.
The whole story is simply a quest to find a certain character.
You get a found family trope, lots of LGBTQIA+ rep.
The middle was so so slow and I wanted to dnf it really bad. slightly enjoyed the end though. I don't know if it's a stand alone or not but the end is quite open for me.
The writing style is however very nice to read.
I'm excited to receive my Illumicrate copy of this.
I don't think this book was quite for me, but I'm sure it will be for lots of other people!

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was disappointing for me. I loved Murderbot, so I stuck it out and finished it, but I wish I had DNFed it. It's not that this book is BAD; it's just that I felt myself not caring about anything that was happening or any of the characters. The only character I felt I "knew" or had any emotional investment in was Kai. I appreciated the nonbinary worldbuilding and having a gay MC and some worldbuilding elements, like the whale. But again, I felt very disconnected from the story.

The first thing that was a problem for me was the extremely long list of characters given to us before the story even begins. I feel that this is lazy. I don't want to have to memorize tons of characters before I even read a story in order to know what's going on. Because of this list, I felt that characters were not introduced well in the actual story. It's the writer's job to integrate character introductions into the story; giving the readers homework to do was a poor choice in my opinion. Because of this, I felt like I was in the dark for a lot of the story and I had a hard time concentrating and understanding what was happening in the plot.

Again, this book isn't BAD - It's a creative fantasy. It just wasn't well executed.

Very excited to see how this series progresses!
4⭐️!
Super interesting premise & very much high fantasy. The first book in a high fantasy series is always a slower read for me because of the info dumping. But once I got immersed in the world building the story really picked up! My reading experience was reminiscent of The Goblin Emperor (which I absolutely love!) and I already can’t wait for the next book!

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

DNF 21%. It really pains me to write this review, but I just couldn’t finish this. I love Martha Well’s Murderbot series, so I was hopeful that this would be equally great. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case.
I’m not sure if this book has the potential to be great, but it became a chore trying to read this every day. The book starts with a list of characters, which doesn’t bother me as I usually just read through and assume I’ll pick up the characters as I read further. Not true with this book, I was constantly flipping back to the list of characters to try to keep track of not only the characters but the plot. This brings me to the major issue, the plot! You’re dropped into the middle of this world where you meet Kai, who suddenly awakens from being held captive in a water trap. After escaping, Kai is trying to piece together what lead to his capture and what has occurred in the time that he’s been imprisoned. The book flips back and forth between the past and present. I was hopeful that the past sections would elucidate aspects of the book, but I was just as lost as Kai. The world building is lacking as well, I never quite understood the Magic system. Most of what I understood was pieced together from various parts of the book. I was left guessing most of the time, and trying to draw a picture on my own. The fact that the reader is left so completely in the dark prevented me from connecting with the story. 21% is roughly one hundred pages. At this point, I should understand more but I don’t. I will say that I did enjoy the characters, I just didn’t find the story compelling. I want to thank publisher and Net Galley for the arc.

I’m DNFing this for now at 50%.
While I am interested in the story and do like the book. It’s a lot. I found that I just couldn’t read much of it at a time before I needed a break.

The fact that this started out with a very long character list had me nervous going into it. I didn’t really understand what was happening in the beginning and then when it starts jumping back to the past, I just couldn’t keep it all straight.

At half way through, I still don’t really know much about the characters or the world. The politics confuse me and I felt really dumb for not understanding things that were going on

My thanks to both NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for an advanced copy of this fantasy novel set in a world of demons, magic users, innocents and evil doers, death and always revenge.

Not many authors can jump from genres even though many bookstores still feel that fantasy books and science fictions books are the same product. Doing the impossible in science fiction can be done with a lot of techno-babble and made up science. The impossible in a fantasy world can be done with a twitch of the nose, and the words, well its magic. Making science and magic real in their respective universes is tough, to be able to do it in two different genres is really awe-inspiring. And make me quite envious. I've long been a fan of Martha Wells Murderbot series, a series that I recommend quite a lot, and will do so here, but have never really delved in Wells' fantasy stories. I have been missing out. Witch King, hopefully the first book in a very long new series is a big book following characters from their end to their beginnings and back again, filled with action, lots of magic, and fantastic writing.

Kai, one of our heroes, is awoken after he has been murdered to find that Kai's body has been trapped in a prison of specific design to keep his soul from escaping. And that he is not alone in his prison. A group of motley pirates and a magic user have disturbed his cell, trying to steal his body for power and gain. Kai quickly dispatches them, and frees his companion a fellow Witch Ziede. Neither has any idea how they became to be trapped, nor Kai killed. Years earlier Kai and his companions had helped overthrow a foul group of overlords who had killed and enslaved thousands, in a war that had ravaged most of the known world. Kai has enemies, but he fears that true threats might be closer, from people that he trusted. Alone, not sure who to trust, Kai Ziede and their new friends begin to follow clues to who attacked them, and the fate of their friends. For Kai is more than a powerful Witch, Kai is also a demon, and Kai is getting very angry.

This is a stand alone, but one that I hope there will be a lot more of. Wells starts the story right in the action and never lets up, so there might be a slight learning curve, but Wells is far too good a writer to make it difficult. Alternating chapters tell of Kai as a younger demon, his meeting with Ziede, and the man who gave them freedom and inspired them to revolt, along with the trying to determine who might be plotting against them. Wells unfolds the story carefully never dumping info, or dropping too much too fast. Kai has a younger companion that has been rescued who becomes the reader in a way, asking questions for us, and letting the information come through her. I particularly liked the magic and its rules. A lot of interesting campaigns could come from this story for role playing. The magic made sense, and I love how sometimes it just got out of hand, succeeding far more than it should, and actually making more problems. The ending was a tad rushed, which makes me think there must be more for these characters. I do hope there is.

Recommended for readers of Martha Wells without a doubt. Great story, fun, interesting characters, and a big new world to explore. A perfect place to start for new readers. Also great for role playing ideas. The magic, the world, the demons, some of the different classes and people. There is a lot to be learned here. And of course a lot to enjoy.

To say I was excited to get my hands on an ARC of Martha Wells’ Witch King is an understatement. I’m a big Murderbot fan (who isn’t?) and as soon as I heard about this book, I knew I was going to review it.

This is such an interesting story - filled with politics, war, magic, and found family. Which, as we know, are some of my favourite things.

We begin the story with the awakening of the Witch King. Kaiisteron or Kai, as he is referred to in the book, is a demon. Summoned to aid the Saredi people, Kai’s initial years among humans are peaceful ones. Until a magical race called the Heirarchs invade and destroy his adopted tribe. In a desperate bid to fight back, Kai joins forces with a motley crew, all of different races: Ziede the witch, Bashasa who is human, and Tahren and Dahin who are from a race called the blessed.

Kai, who had been magically coerced into sleep, wakes up to a world that hasn’t realised he was gone. Along with Ziede, who was imprisoned alongside him, he’s on a mission to find out who betrayed him and unravel what appears to be an increasingly complicated political plot.

The book has some glorious world building in Martha’s signature style. There are no info dumps here, everything is woven into the story without compromising the quicksilver pace. Despite it being fantastical, there’s a lot of room for human emotion. Kai loves, grieves, and hurts - his prodigious powers can’t save him from that. He is also keenly aware that even among demons he’s an anomaly.

There’s something wonderfully endearing about this all powerful demon who has a soft spot for the underdog and doesn’t really want to hurt people despite being surrounded by treachery. I love how this book subverted all the demon tropes, while still using lore you will all recognise. Read it, you’ll see what I mean!

Honestly, it’s hard to do this book justice because of the wonderfully layered writing, complex world building, and political manoeuvring. Let’s just say that I’m hoping this is a series. I’m not sure I want to say goodbye to Kai just yet.

Martha Wells is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winner, and her skill and appeal is evident in all of her work. This story - one hopes the first in a series - is more serious than her Murderbot series, which combined science fiction with a humorous protagonist that could have done stand-up at the Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina.

"Witch King" is set in a fantasy world with the focus on the demon Kaiisteron, called Kai, who is the Fourth Prince of the Underearth. He is also called the Witch King. (Witches were supposed to have been born of the mix of demon and mortal blood during the long-ago war with the underearth.)

Kai’s real body was in the underearth, under the realm of the Fourth House with all the others who had taken a bargain to come to the upper world in mortal form.

The story goes back and forth between the past and the present, in episodes that dovetail one another. For example, we first meet Kai, in both time periods, during a stint of imprisonment.

In the past story line, the autocratic and cruel Heirarchs controlled most of the world, and also closed off passage to and from the underearth, trapping demons in their mortal bodies so they couldn’t escape. Kai had been captured with other demons and chained up in a foul section of the Heirarch’s Summer Halls. He was rescued by Bashasa, a prince of the Benais-arik, who had been brought to the Summer Halls as a hostage to ensure the “good behavior” of his people. Bashasa didn’t know who Kai was, but he was the right size to swap out for the dead body of Bashasa’s younger sister, and Bashasa wanted help from a demon to defeat the Hierarchs.

When Bashasa met Kai he was not afraid to look at him or touch him as most mortals were. Instead he said, “I have a proposition for you. Help me destroy the Hierarchs.” Kai was suspicious and hostile initially, but Bashasa put his hand on Kai’s arm and said gently, ‘Come, we are all prisoners of the Hierarchs here, one way or another. Fighting with each other is the last thing we should do.’” Kai was startled and disarmed; few mortals ever voluntarily touched a demon; generally, they hated, feared, and reviled them.

Kai’s time at the Summer Halls after rescue by Bashasa was also when he met Ziede Daiyahah, another witch who became his lifelong friend, and Tahren Stargard, an Immortal Blessed. She was called the Fallen because she, alone among the Blessed, had rebelled against the Heirarchs. Those two were also helping Bashasa.

In the present, we know that Bashasa, being a mortal, is long dead. Kai and Ziede were abducted from the palace of Bashat, Bashasa’s descendant, in Benais-arik, and had been imprisoned for the past year. As the story begins, they managed to escape. Tahren Stargard, now Ziede’s wife, was also taken but they did not know where, and Ziede was desperate to find her. They speculated all of it was an attempt to interfere with the renewal of the Rising World coalition [the post-Hierarch power structure] that would establish it as an Empire. A faction in the rival city of Nient-arik wanted to usurp Benais-arik’s place as the ruling capital of the Rising World. The fact that Kai, Ziede, and Tahren were all missing helped Nient-arik maintain that Benais-arik had lost support of the Witchlands and the Immortal Blessed. But Ziede and Kai were convinced that Bashat was behind their capture. Bashat could use their absence to expose the Nient-arik as a nest of traitors and come out of the situation even stronger.

As we go back and forth in time, we find out how all these circumstances arose, as well as learning about the various powers of the different races, including not only witches, demons, and the Immortal Blessed, but Heirarchs and their enforcers, the Expositors.

Kai, who is part witch, part demon, and part mortal, exhibits just as much complexity and nuance as you would hope for from his mixed heritage. He is fierce, courageous, intelligent, loyal, loving, and willing both to acknowledge his mistakes and to learn from them.

I loved this book. I earnestly hope for a sequel!

Thank you Netgalley and Tor for providing me with this eACR in exchange for my honest opinion.

I do not know where to start with this one. So I think I'll just have to start by saying, is this a good, complex, well written epic fantasy? Yes. Did I like it? No and yes, and that makes it really hard to rate this book. I think it deserves 4 stars, but I sadly just can't give it that.

Martha Wells starts with dropping you right in to the story, where we meet Kai, who are locked in a tomb and doesn't remember how it happened. I loved the beginning, it hooked me good and it made me super excited for the rest of the story. Also, we meet a shell-whale and I'm desperate for someone to draw that for me! But then... We get thrown so many names, places and creatures I had to start writing down in my notebook to keep track. Behind some of the names I've noted "Is this a family, a king or a kingdom?", so you can see where this book let me down a little. It may have been that I weren't in the right head space for this book right now, but tbh I just felt kind of stupid.

Now, this book also had a lot of positives, I liked the plot, the characters, the world, the magic-system, sounds like a five star read, right? It just did not land, with every positive, there was a little negative for me. The magic was never explained, the different creatures we only got some sentences here and there about, I don't usually scream for an infodump, but I could've needed one with this book. It got harder and harder to pick the book up, even after I started to understand more of the world. The last hour of the book flew by and was the most exciting part of the book for me, but that part felt rushed after such a slow start.

- The world-building is massive and brilliant, and this book will definitely do good with a detailed map and preferably some illustrations of these magical creatures and strange structures between the pages.
- I enjoyed the characters a lot, and the found family trope was well executed.
- It's alternating between past and present, which I liked, but I wish we got a little more present before we got thrown back to when nobody knew each other and all the names are different again.
- We got a gay MC, and a non-binary world, which was refreshing!
- The book does a beautiful job taking on betrayal, loyalty, friendship and grief.
- A couple of the side-characters I really liked, they intrigued me and I was a little disappointed when we didn't get more from them.
- It seems like this is a stand-alone? I think that a lot of my problems with this book would've been solved if, 1. It was a series, with more time to explore the world/characters and plot or 2. It was a novella, short and sweet.

If you enjoy epic fantasy, slow pacing, massive world-building, strange creatures and a complex magic system, you might enjoy this book! It just didn't hit the mark for me at this time.