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Book: “Island Witch” by Amanda Jayatissa
Publishing Info: Berkley, February 2024
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: Inspired by Sri Lankan folklore, award-winning author Amanda Jayatissa turns her feverish, Gothic-tinged talents to late 19th century Sri Lanka where the daughter of a traditional demon-priest—relentlessly bullied by peers and accused of witchcraft herself—tries to solve the mysterious attacks that have been terrorizing her coastal village.
Being the daughter of the village Capuwa, or demon-priest, Amara is used to keeping mostly to herself. Influenced by the new religious practices brought in by the British Colonizers, the villagers who once respected her father’s craft have turned on the family. Yet, they all still seem to call on him whenever supernatural disturbances arise.
Now someone—or something —is viciously seizing upon men in the jungle. But instead of enlisting Amara’s father’s help, the villages have accused him of carrying out the attacks himself.
As she tries to clear her father’s name, Amara finds herself haunted by dreams that eerily predict the dark forces on her island. And she can’t shake the feeling that it’s all connected to the night she was recovering from a strange illness, and woke up, scared and confused, to hear her mother’s frantic. No one can find out what happened .
Lush, otherworldly, and recalling horror classics like Carrie and The Exorcist , Island Witch is a deliciously creepy and darkly feminist tale about the horrors of moral panic, the violent space between girlhood and adulthood, and what happens when female rage is finally unleashed.
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
If a book has references to “Carrie” and “The Exorcist” and adds in the promise of feminist rage in a not as seen setting, I am absolutely going to want to get my hands on it. That is just catnip for me, really. So seeing the description (and FANTASTIC) cover for Amanda Jayatissa’s new horror novel “Island Witch” really, really caught my interest. I love horror that takes on wider societal themes, I love feminist exploration within the genre, and there is also THAT AMAZING COVER. I was really excited to read this book, and had really high hopes. But I’m dismayed to report that they weren’t really met, at least not as much as I had expected them to.
I’ll start with the good, though. What I really liked about this book was how Jayatissa takes on the concepts of misogyny, religious zealotry, and colonialism and imperialism with her setting of 1800s Sri Lanka, as a young woman named Amara is seeing her village slowly turn against her and her father, the local Capuwa (or demon priest, as he performs rituals and exorcisms to ward off demons) when mysterious attacks leave men dead. Amara is an intriguing main character, as she finds herself a target of her community as their Christian belief system sees her and her family as threatening, and starts to realize that there are other dangers beyond the potential demonic attacks. I love how Jayatissa explores the way that Amara’s community, former friends, and even at times family holds her gender against her, her family against her, and her non-Christian beliefs against her, and how Amara’s desperation to clear her father’s name becomes more about clearing her own. Jayatissa doesn’t shy away from violence, sexism, prejudice, and trauma, and Amara’s journey harkens to other feminist horror tales of women taking back their power from those that want to take it away and snuff it out. I also found a lot of the demon lore and other horror aspects to be pretty good, and at times more ambiguous as opposed to cut and dry about good and evil.
But I had a really hard time with the first person perspective of this book, because while trying to show Amara’s coming of age, and her journey to find out the truth about what is happening in her community and both the dead men and the women they left behind, made for a lot of telling instead of showing. I definitely get that Amara is starting out as a somewhat naive and hopeful person, and has to become more hardened as she is finding out dark truths about those around her and the potential demonic activity, but her voice was very stilted, and at times hamfisted in execution. There were many times that it took me out of the story, and her inner thoughts would project a very obvious plot point that was coming up because of how much telling she was doing. It was too bad, because I think that had Amara’s voice been a little more complex this would have connected a lot better with me.
“Island Witch” was a mixed bag for me. I loved the effort and the greater themes, but the narrative style muddled it up a bit.
Rating 6: Overall I liked the themes of misogyny and colonial oppression and group think, but I thought that the voice of the main character was a little more simplistic than I had hoped for, and made it a stilted flow.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Island Witch” is included on the Goodreads lists “Popsugar 2024 #40: A Horror Book Written by a BIPOC Author”, and “Historical Fiction 2024”.
The Library Ladies 