Okay. So, The Dryad Storm, the last book in the long-running Black Witch series, is not just the longest book in the series at 724 pages, with all the others having 600 or a little over, but the text is smaller too, to the point where I think if this were the same font size as the others, it would be about 900 pages. If that’s the case, this is the longest book I’ve read in my life. And I will say it’s a work that requires patience to get through, and some in-between breaks. The last two books in this series, The Shadow Wand and The Demon Tide, were like that for me too. But it’s worth it – The Dryad Storm is pure war, pure genocide – a saga where the stakes are incredibly high, and everything from the last four books has built up to this. There have been disappointingly anticlimactic finales to series before, and this is not one. In fact, this is the real deal.
This monstrously long final Black Witch book has our heroes in a continuous nightmare, fighting for their lives and the future of the whole world. The last four books had them in tremendous peril, but this is on a whole different scale. Reading this book is like witnessing a xenophobic monster on a dragon; a monster who is enthusiastically using it to light your entire home, country and world on fire. There’s something about the irreversible destruction, the misery, the implications, and the fury of loss that put this above most other fantasy novels, or novels in general. It’s not here to play around with lore. It’s here to murder en masse.
Laurie Forest’s Black Witch books have always been clear and effective in the cruelty and torture done by the Gardnerians and the Magedom, and I have cared about this story to the point where this series is in my Top 3 of most beloved book series of all time, even though I wasn’t a fan of the third book at all. This whole series also shows the beauty of open-mindedness, compassion, and unity instead of supremacy. The world of Erthia is such an amazing comparison to our world that you will completely believe the different factions and discriminations.
I won’t spoil how it ends, but let’s just say it has a realism about how valuable and irreplaceable the environment is, and how even in magical worlds, eradication of so many trees and wildlife can’t just be solved with a simple spell or ritual. It doesn’t have a Disney-like way of tidying things up.
This would be pretty much a perfect book if it didn’t have this one thing, and it’s a flaw with the writing. The word “prismatic” shoots up about 100 times here. No exaggeration. 100 times. Especially from Elloren’s point of view. Prismatic lightning, prismatic domes, prismatic magic, everything. I don’t know why it became Laurie Forest’s new favourite word all of a sudden, but it ended up eye-rollingly annoying. It was never like that in the series prior. I looked up the word, and it means something consisting of many different bright colours, like those separated from white light by a prism. She could’ve used words like “glowing, bright, enveloped in light” from time to time.
But if that’s the only true flaw, I can live with it. Okay, the book’s a bit cluttered with multiple characters and side religions too. You may have forgotten about some of them over the past few books. But thankfully The Dryad Storm is so fast and angry and brutal and terrifying that it doesn’t get in the way too much. If anything, it makes me want to return to the beginning and meet these characters all over again to remind myself of all we’ve gone through with them.
The Dryad Storm is not a perfect final entry, but it is an epic one. It takes a long time to read, but being on the frontline of a war is like that. Sometimes the biggest stories about the biggest of consequences need a few hundred thousand words to be told on the required scale. It’s been a fair bit of time since I finished this book. Only now am I publishing this review, and it has stuck with me like glue. I think about it constantly, and I can’t give higher praise for a work of art than that. Years ago, when I read the first Black Witch and The Iron Flower, I remember being incredibly excited to keep up with the series. So this book, as the finale, had a lot to live up to, and it delivered.
My grade: 5 stars out of 5
William J. McGinn 
Leave a comment