Book Review: The Wilderwomen by Ruth Emmie Lang
With magic powers and a missing mother, The Wilderwomen is a novel about family, finding yourself, and the beauty of magic. Check out my full review of The Wilderwomen below!
Book Information
Zadie and Finn are sisters with special powers. Zadie is a psychic, and Finn can see memories from other people after the events have happened. They used to be so close. That was before their mom, Nora, disappeared, though, and Finn went to live with foster parents. Finn doesn’t think their mom left on purpose, she thinks that Nora’s own powers drove her away, but Zadie does, which is why she has sworn to never use her power again. Finn, though, knows she can use her powers to find Nora and bring their family back together again. Even though Zadie is only going because Finn asked, Finn knows she’ll soon cave and use her powers to find their mother as well.
Review | Heidi Dischler
So, I want to start out with the fact that this wasn’t a bad novel. It had a promising story and likable characters. The problem, though? It fell flat. There were many things that contributed to this, and I’ll get into that a little more below.
First off, I don’t feel like the drive to find their mom, Nora, was strong enough to pull me along the entire novel. The stakes weren’t high enough, and I just didn’t feel as involved as I would’ve liked. The thing that did keep me reading was the sisters’ powers. Other than that, though, I lost a lot of interest about halfway through the novel.
The writing was really great, though, and had good moments of dialogue and description. Which is also why I didn’t understand how the plot fell so flat because the writing was really beautiful.
Spoilers ahead.
One thing I really really didn’t understand/didn’t like was Nora’s power. Like, okay, that was one of the most confusing plot lines ever. She has to… wait for it… migrate? What kind of power is that? And with the prologue, Ruth Emmie Lang really gave it away. She didn’t need to talk about birds so much to get us to guess it…. I don’t know, maybe I’m just upset that the power sucked so bad haha, but really, though. It was way too anticlimactic for my liking. And Nora being in a coma-like state when Zadie found her? Also having been that way for years without a sound reason? Yeah, that’s not gonna fly for me. Just felt like a huge plot hole in my opinion.
Overall, I feel like this novel had a lot of promise and beautiful writing. However, it fell so flat and became a little redundant after the first half of the novel. Three stars for me. Not my favorite, but also definitely not a bad book.
Source: Personal Copy
(P.S. You can read this book for free by signing up for a free trial of Audible, which gives you two free audiobooks of your choice!)
