I recently had the opportunity to read The Waking Forest by Alyssa Wees (thank you Netgalley). I love that cover! So spooky. I have mixed feelings about the book though.
The Waking Forest is divided into two parts. In part one, the chapters alternate between the story of the Witch of Wishes, who lives in an enchanted forest and grants wishes to visiting children, and a family of homeschoolers who are a little strange (the main character, Rhea, has visions). As the story progresses, you eventually find out what these two storylines have in common. Part two builds on the first part, and I don’t wish to give spoilers.
This book does have a lot of good things going for it. Ms. Wees has a very descriptive style, somewhat like Laini Taylor. Although some of her descriptions are beautiful or clever, I wouldn’t exactly describe her words as beautiful prose like I do with Taylor. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the descriptions, which help the story come to life.
I really enjoyed the first part of the book, where we read about the Witch of Wishes in the forest, who befriends a boy who visits her disguised as a fox, and the family who lives next to the beach and have names that all start with R. It was fun to see the similarities in the stories and try to figure out how they were related. This part of the book would have gotten a solid four stars from me.
After we find out how these two storylines converge, part 2 was… just okay to me. While the descriptive prose remains, the action was a little muddy and I didn’t find it to be all that interesting. Sometimes things were a little confusing.
The other part that I found to be a little confusing was all the names in the family whose names started with R. It was hard to keep track of all of them, and they don’t have a small family. Amazon says this book is only 298 pages. With such a small space devoted to the family, it was really hard to get to know what all of their personalities were like. Fewer family members or more pages devoted to getting to know them would have probably helped with that.
Overall, I thought this story was okay. I’d consider reading future books by this author, but The Waking Forest isn’t one of the best books I’ve read this month.
That cover is stunning, but it’s disappointing that the contents were just okay. Hope you have better luck with your next read.
The next thing I read was Four Dead Queens and it was great! And Sky Without Stars is what I’m reading now and I love it too!