Bad Writing Masterclass: A Discovery of Witches

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I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but we’re living in the golden age of witch-fic. Books about witches are inundating the fantasy and YA shelves; you can’t swing a black cat without hitting four novels with crystals and pentagrams on their covers. This has come alongside a trend of literary novels infused with the earthy scent of pagan-influenced folk horror, as seen in books like Max Porter’s Lanny.

I don't know whether all of these books are chasing a big trend-setter or if a bunch of authors have decided to become wiccans or what, but this is all extremely My Aesthetic so I’m on board with it. Last week Deborah Harkness’ entire All Souls Trilogy popped up in the Kindle daily deal for less than a euro (including the intruiging “All Souls real-time reading companion”, whatever that is), and since I suspect that those books may be part of the impetus behind the trend, I heartily smashed that purchase button (because the last time I impulse-bought something from the Kindle daily deal, it went very well). Can the first book in the trilogy provide the witchy content I crave?

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Bad Writing Masterclass: Docile

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A few days ago I put out a call for bad books on Twitter, intending to either do a review or the next entry in my long-running and wildly popular Books I Didn’t Finish series. And I still intend to do that with other nominees, but someone tipped me off to a book so riddled with problems that I realized my review was going to turn into a paragraph-by-paragraph dissection.

The last time this happened was with a certain fantasy novel starring a red-haired lute-playing protagonist, and that resulted in me going through the entire thing and commenting on every single page. With my current health problems I don’t have the energy to commit to a long serialized post format—as evidenced by the multiple aborted attempts I’ve made over the last three years—but the book in question contains enough material just in its opening chapters to critique.

The intent behind this isn’t to simply point and laugh; it’s called Bad Writing Masterclass because my hope is that by dissecting the problems with this book, your own writing might improve. Even if you don’t write, maybe this can help you become a more critical reader and stop giving five-star ratings to total gar—I mean, improve your reading experience. Yes.

With that preamble out of the way, let’s begin today’s Bad Writing Masterclass on Docile by K.M. Szpara.

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