Table of Contents
Why Witch Queen Rising?
I first heard about Witch Queen Rising from Elliot Brooks’ April 2026 releases video. At the time I thought the premise sounded intriguing and I am especially interested in reading fantasy debuts nowadays so I put the book in my to-be-read pile and put in a hold for it at the library.
The library hold for this book arrived last week and I started it this past Sunday and finished it on Tuesday. This is my first time reading anything by Savannah Stephens. Blurbs on the paperback edition I read are from – Alexis Henderson, Kim Harrison, and Del Sandeen. Witch Queen Rising is the first book in the Blood and Magic duology.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
Witch Queen Rising is an urban fantasy that takes place in the city of New Orleans and follows the story of one Seraphine Barreau aka Phine aka The Tick Witch. She is one of the New Orleans witchkin who returns to the city after she is chosen by the magical powers that be as the next Prime – the queen of New Orleans’ witchkin.
Seraphine is referred to as the Tick Witch for her ability to feed on magic, she is what is known as a Syphon in this world’s magic system. Syphon are also able to share their magic with others but the ability to feed on magic makes her an outcast amongst her fellow witchkin.
Family Drama
One of the many conflicts at the heart of Seraphine’s story is that the position of Prime was not supposed to be given to her, it was supposed to be given to a member of a rival magical House as it has been for generations before her. This means that not only is she thrust back into a world she left but also many witchkin see her as undeserving of her power including her sister.
In addition to that, the reason Seraphine left is due to the way she was treated by her mother and sister. Family drama and trauma is at the heart of Witch Queen Rising. This is my primary criticism of the book – vast chunks of the book involve Seraphine working through her feelings regarding her (dead) mother and her sister who also dislikes her. There is a lot of baggage to unpack and that’s what the book does.
To be quite frank, I was not expecting nor was I ready for this book to have this much familial conflict resolution be part of the story and to make matters worse I did not find it particularly compelling reading either. I wish the story had focused more on the political intrigue between the witchkin and the other magical factions (Sidhe, vampires, and shifters).
World
A secondary criticism is that the urban fantasy world in Witch Queen Rising is not bringing anything novel to the table. In addition to the witches, there are the Sidhe, vampires and shifters (people who transform into animals). Nothing about the non-witch factions is anything I haven’t seen before. The witches at least are sub-divided into different affinity groups of different kinds of magic – necromancy, puppetry, water, plants, siphons etc. The rest of the groups are not diversified much if at all.
What is particularly egregious is the depiction of vampires in this book. This is perhaps the most cartoonishly evil I have seen vampires be and it makes for very dull reading. At this point in my life I have read plenty of fantasy novels that involve vampires and they usually depict vampires with a lot more nuance than this novel does – Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files as an example of urban fantasy that does vampires much better.
One positive I want to highlight is that as far as I can tell the book does a reasonably good job of representing New Orleans Black culture in various forms – local cuisine being mentioned, along with the weather, religion, and there was one instance of the author using an African American Vernacular English (AAVE) word that I hadn’t seen before – saditty. And last but not least, the main character Seraphine is a Black woman.
Characters
As for other secondary and side characters, I don’t have much to say about them. Hell, I don’t have much to say about Seraphine herself other than – she drives a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, likes baking and has enough mommy issues to keep a therapist busy for a decade. The other characters feel more like plot vehicles than actual people, even Seraphine’s sister Josephine who is ostensibly key to Seraphine’s character development felt lackluster.
Moira, the Sidhe Queen is the closest the book gets to an interesting non-human character but there isn’t enough of her in the book for my liking. The depiction of fae in this book is not novel but due to the relatively uninteresting human characters, the fae are the most interesting purely because they are markedly different from the humans and there is an air of mystery to them.
Conclusions
Witch Queen Rising was a miss for me. It was not offensively bad but nothing about it stood out either. I felt that that book was bogged down by the family drama and trauma it had to deal with and would have been better served developing its world, political intrigue and non-primary characters. It was not helped by the fact that the magical world did not have anything new or interesting to offer and was filled with caricatures rather than characters.
As far as fantasy debuts from this year are concerned, this was a middling one at best. I do not regret reading it but I will not be reading the second book in the duology whenever that comes out. It is a bit disappointing because urban fantasy as a sub-genre feels underserved at the moment and it would have been nice to get a new urban fantasy series that I enjoy but alas this is not it.
That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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