The Honey Witch: What is love?

Author: Sydney J. Shields

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

I nearly DNFed this book, but about a week after putting it down, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to finish the last hundred pages. I’m glad I did, but not for the reason you might think.

This book follows Marigold Claude, a woman living in the English-coded, fictional town of Bardshire in the 1830s where she doesn’t fit in due to her lack of any sort of artistic talent nor the desire to be a wife and mother as was expected to be the sole objective of any woman of a certain social standing at the time. Our story starts when Marigold’s grandmother comes to tell Marigold that she is a Honey Witch, an identity passed down through the matrilineal line of their family to the eldest daughter. Her grandmother presents her the opportunity to claim her powers, though there is a catch. The Honey Witches have been cursed by an Ash Witch and are fated never to be able to find their true love. Marigold, being completely uninterested in marriage, is happy to accept this tradeoff, and happily claims her heritage and returns to her grandmother’s home of Innisfree.

While there, among days of learning to utilize her magic to create spells with honey and herbs to aid those who seek the Honey Witches’ help, Marigold meets Lottie Burke, a friend of a friend, who is immediately skeptical of Marigold’s magic.

I did not like Lottie’s character, which was unfortunate as this book is a fantasy romance, and she is our love interest. Lottie reminds me a bit of Nesta from ACOTAR, but more juvenile and less interesting. She doesn’t believe in magic and thinks Marigold is giving people false hope with her magical remedies, and she is constantly rude and cold to Marigold for this reason. Though we do learn about the origin of her distrust, her characterization was not skillful enough for me to overlook her poor attitude.

I think that if the author had made this book dual POV, it would have been easier to be sympathetic towards Lottie as we would have had a richer understanding of her cynicism. Though this isn’t strictly necessary, this was lacking enough that it made it hard to understand why Marigold was attracted to her, which made the romance sub-par.

That wasn’t great as this book was about 50% romance, 20% fantasy plot and 30% vibes. I will say, while I like the vibes (the setting of Innisfree, the lore around how the Honey Witches used magic and kept bees and protected the island), the rest of it fell quite flat. The fantasy plot seemed to just be there for convenience to cause conflict when needed, but it was otherwise quite shallow and not well thought-out.

The thing that made me want to pick this book back up after deciding to DNF it was curiosity about whether anything interesting would come of the Ash Witch’s curse. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in that regard.

***Spoiler warning***

The curse from the Ash Witch is supposed to prevent anyone from falling in love with a Honey Witch. When it came to how this actually worked in practice though, it seemed to only come into effect when the Marigold was getting physically intimate with Lottie. When this happened, Lottie would get ill, to the point that during one chapter she nearly dies.

This seemed to me a very narrow interpretation of love, and it felt like the author was trying to force the concept to work without actually thinking about it. As we don’t get anything from Lottie’s POV, we don’t actually know how she’s feeling towards Marigold, but as the story progresses, there are indicators that they have a love for each other.

What really made me question this execution of the author’s concept was actually the way the curse played out between Marigold’s grandmother and her neighbor. Throughout the book, there is a kindly neighbor called Mr. Benny, who owns a farm near Innisfree, and would bring Marigold and her grandmother produce, which it seemed was their main source of food as they did not accept payment for the magic they did for people. This arrangement was allegedly due to the fact that Marigold’s grandmother (and later Marigold) would perform magic to keep Mr. Benny’s farm fertile and productive. It later turns out that Marigold’s grandmother and Mr. Benny were in love at the time the Ash Witch cursed her and that “something changed” after that.

When this was revealed, it immediately made me think of bell hooks’ All About Love, which I read last month and talked about the concept of love not only as a feeling but as an action. Judging by Mr. Benny’s actions both before and after Marigold’s grandmother’s death, which happens during the book, Mr. Benny was still very much in love with her grandmother. And though I can’t say Lottie displayed the same amount of devotion (which also just felt odd given that this book is primarily their romance), it was clear that Marigold and Lottie had feelings for each other (despite the fact that it was unclear why this was). However, it seemed we just had to accept that they didn’t “really” love each other because of this curse on blind faith.

Ultimately, if the only actual indication that they didn’t love each other was the fact that they couldn’t have sex, then what the author is saying is that the fundamental expression of true love is sex, which seemed like a weird message.