I tend to be a creature of comfort falling back on specific historical or mythological timelines and locations for my reading. Scandinavian literature has never piqued my interest... Ms. Gornichec has succeeded twice now in broadening my subject range with books that I not only finished but immensely enjoyed.

Set in 10th century Norway, this is the tale of Oddny, Gunnhild, and Signy. Gunnhild runs away with a visiting sorceress and commits herself to learning magic. Years later, when raiders take Signy, Gunnhild vows to find her sister and seek revenge. Oddny travels back to their village to help Gunnhild, meeting and joining forces with King Eirik.

The relationship between the three girls was well developed, and twined throughout the novel. I enjoyed reading from Oddny and Gunnhild's points of view an wish Signy's point of view had also been explored. The story was well paced, the world well developed. I look forward to reading more from this author!

A compelling story of family and friendship. Family doesn't have to just mean those to whom you were born, it can also be those with whom you choose a strong bond. These bonds can be tested and it's up to you what you choose to do about it. A fascinating and enjoyable read.

Icelandic folklore comes to life in this tale of Gunnhilde and her friends, sisters Oddny and Signy. While Gunnhilde is away studying to be a witch, Viking's raid the sisters farm and take Signy. Gunnhilde and Oddny find one another and work together to find and rescue Signy.

I enjoyed this book. The characters were well thought out and the plot was paced in a way that made sense. I would recommend this book to others and would enjoy reading other novels by this author.

This was exactly the historical fantasy romance I didn't know I needed. Definitely going to be a tough sell to readers, but the ones who commit to it will LOVE it.

Genevieve Gornichec DOES NOT MISS. Damn. I was so excited to see she had a new book out this Summer and moved it to the top of the list as soon as the DRC became available. I'm going to be screaming about this book for years to come and pressing it into the hands of so many customers.

I was so excited to read this after reading the Witches Heart and how creative that telling of Loki and his wife was. I loved the show Vikings and this definitely gave me the same vibes, but a little more of the stronger women aspect.

Epic, I was thoroughly engrossed in the story, setting, and characters. I know we can visualize the characters and stories in our heads as we’re reading, but I feel like there are some stories that have that cinematic quality to it. The Weaver and the Witch Queen feels cinematic.

Have you seen any of Robert Eggers films? If you have, then you’ll know what I mean, because when I started reading The Weaver and the Witch Queen I felt transported, similar to how Eggers crafts his movies with a wealth of detail that has viewers completely immersed into the film and its setting. As though you are keeping pace with each character, your senses heighthened by how Gornichec masterfully pulls you in, unable to to resist.

Equal parts fantasy romance and Norse mythology, I am bewitched by vivid, glittering characters that Gornichec effortlessly created. They leap off the page with such precision they feel as real as the detailed world they inhabit. With a fascinating story of three women twined together by fates thread making this story utterly fascinating.

It’s unputdownable.

Preorder this one book friends if you enjoy Norse mythology, witchcraft, romance, and revenge. I would highly recommend grabbing a copy when it comes out July 25th.

Happy Reading ~ Cece

I received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review from NetGalley. This novel was particularly interesting, and filled with mystical influences for our main protagonist Gunnhild. I like how the author mixed fiction and mythology with some verifiable history in this retelling of Norse history.

Like her novel "The Witch's Heart", this story mixes a great deal of Norse mythology with a feminist retelling. Our protagonist is driven to escape her home as a child, and ends up as a sorceress, only to become Queen of Norway by marrying King Eric. This story is perfect for those who enjoy realistic stories of history laced with the supernatural and sometimes mythical proportions of Norse legends.

I found this author's work a little bit dry and slow at times. I do think that some of the emotional difficulties between Eric and our protagonist were hard to read, almost coming off as sophomoric. However, I truly enjoyed the friendship between the women characters, all the sisterhood of various social roles in this story, plus the interesting layers of witches on either side of a legendary historical battle.

Perfect for fans of Madeline Miller, and Alix Harrow.

I'm going to be that annoying person shoving this book at everyone I know once it comes out. A historical fantasy set in the age of Vikings with a sister-bond plot, revenge, enemies to lovers, and adventure? And that doesn't even include the magic? Yeah, this is incredible. I kept thinking about this book when I couldn't read it, and I will be thinking about it long after I put it down. A very satisfying range of characters, great adventures, and taut family drama.
Plus magic.

Two sisters, Oddny and Signy and their best friend, Gunnhild, swear themselves together with a blood oath, though life takes them in separate directions. Years later, Signy is captured. The other two swear to save her from her captors, but don't know where, who, or why she was taken. Though this is the underlying problem of the book, Gunnhild's and Oddny's journeys wind together with those of matriarchs and witches, princes and kings, animals and bandits. While Signy is always in the back of their mind, Gunnhild and Signy have to navigate complex relationships with those around them and have to decide who could aid and who could harm them.

Gornichec weaves intricacies throughout the book, allowing the reader to explore the characters' motivations and feelings through their own eyes and others' alike, and because of this I felt that I understood the characters' motivations and feelings in a more three-dimensional way than most books I read; the characters are flawed but they are human. I also liked that aspects of the magic in this book aren't explicitly laid out, leaving it up to the reader to speculate how the magic system works.

I greatly enjoyed this book because it beautifully shows the power of sisterhood (biological and sworn alike), that first impressions of people aren't always true, and takes place in a setting and historical period that I personally enjoy reading about and studying. Lastly, I appreciated the content warnings that Gornichec shared on her website and social media, for this book deals with some heavy topics like violence against both people and animals, gore, death, menstrual pain, and slavery.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ace Books for the advanced copy. "The Weaver and the Witch Queen" is likely going to be my favorite book of 2023.

Few authors describe action enough for me to really see it. My neurodivergent brain just sees words, this was truly an exception. I've never read the Witch's Heart but I'm tempted now.

Yes, yes, yes! After "The Witch's Heart," Gornichec became an auto read for me, and this one did not disappoint. The descriptions of Norway are so vivid and compelling, there were times I felt like I was actually experiencing that cold. The characters were incomparable, and I felt attached to them. I was hooked by the story at the very beginning, and I wanted to know how this would all end for these three women. Loved, loved, loved. Thank you so much for the opportunity to read an ARC of this book.

I waivered on how I felt about this book, much like I did with her other book, The Witch's Heart. Gornichec's stories are intriguing and I appreciate that she writes flawed characters and complex relationships. Where she falls short, however, is in language and dialogue. For a story set in the Viking age her language feels modern and dialogue basic, bordering on elementary. I literally cringed when a Viking king retorted "takes one to know one." This middle school-ish I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I back and forth between historical characters distracted from an otherwise good story. The whole book is heavy on (bad) dialogue and lacking in complex world-building, which began to test my patience, and by the last quarter of the book I was simply skimming to see how it ended.

I think Gornichec will appeal to readers who are looking for a simple and easy read with a historical and mythical setting. However, after reading two of her books I would not recommend her to people who are well-versed in the historical or fantasy genres, as I think their bar for realistic language, world-building, and accurate contextual dialogue will be too high.

I really wanted to like this, but in the end I just could not get into it. I gave up on reading it. I didn't connect with the characters at all and the world buildiing didn't appeal to me.

I picked this up because I enjoyed Gornichec's older release 'The Witch's Heart.' I thought the blurb sounded interesting and so I added it to my TBR, especially considering I've been really enjoying reading mythological retellings a la Song of Achilles. I did enjoy The Witch's Heart but I felt that it was perhaps a tad bit generic. In these mythical retellings I think authors struggle with ways to make their books comparable to the original titles written in the more formal, basic writing style but yet not detract from the actual writing and story. & I think Gornechec falls prey to this situation again, similarly as she did in 'The Witch.' Naturally, considering it's supposed to be hundreds and hundreds of years ago in Greek times so the language will be affected, but I got the sense that the author didn't bother to truly study the proper way to speak rather than simply parceling out very limited, basic sentences. I thought it detracted from the story in some ways and just overall prevented the story from being everything that it could have been,

Now that being said, there were a lot of parts I really did enjoy. I loved reading about the sisterly bond, very close friends and sisters are some of my favorite relationships to see and experience. Female friendship is a very unique monster that is often much more accessible as youngens and very hard to replicate fully as adults because that literal physical closeness that we can have as young girls is not nearly the same as adults when we do not spend so much time together, and so I thought Gornichec did a marvelous job at writing a very close female relationship without patronizing them or making them seem younger or immature.

I also very much appreciated that the romantic elements did not take over the entire novel. With this influx of mythological retellings I was very much dreading potentially having to read several romances and feeling like they were all too similar but that was not the case here as the little romance in the book did not take front and center.

Overall, i enjoyed this but I felt that it was good without managing to ever really be exceptional. There was definitely a lot of very harsh elements to the story which at times felt almost gratuitous, things like excessive gore, self mutilation, sex and abuse, etc etc. These elements left me confused about how I was left feeling about the book, I think I would have to say it lands somewhere around a 3.75 for me which was of course rounded up to a 4. Just shy of that 4th star tho.

An easily enjoyable 5-star read that brings the same intrigue of THE WITCH’S HEART with a new cast of characters to fall for

The Weaver and the Witch Queen was a captivating Viking Age historical fantasy. Gunnhild ran away from home and an abusive mother to learn magic. She left behind her best friends Oddny and Signy when she did, but she never forgot them and uses her magic to check on them. While watching one day, Oddny and Signy are attacked and Signy is stolen away. Oddny vows to get her back and Gunnhild immediately sets out to help, procuring the help of King Eirik to get her there faster.

I loved this book. The women were strong, sometimes flawed, people who loved fiercely. The enemies to lovers romance between Gunnhild and Eirik was fantastic, but even better was the romance between Halldor and Oddny.

I also really loved the historical trans representation! Overall, this one checked all the boxes for me!

3.5 stars. I loved Gornichec’s first book so I was curious about this one even though the synopsis didn’t fully grab my interest. I was REALLY enjoying myself for the first half of this, but unfortunately didn’t like the second half much so it brought my rating down.

Gunnhild was BY FAR my favorite and her relationship with Eirik was for the most part, enjoyable, but I just really didn’t enjoy the climax of this book and it made the resolution feel disappointing. I mostly lost interest by the end, and it seems like there’s a possibility for a sequel but I probably wouldn’t be racing to pick it up.