The Last Witch: Volume One

I seriously loved this book. I couldn't put it down and finished it in a day. No it's not your typical woman gets saved and discovers how powerful she is and saves everyone. It shows that she was seriously damaged from all the trauma and when she thinks she's been saved she really is just going to into a bigger cage. She's not as free as she believed she would be. She makes a few friends who she will protect fiercely, she sees how horrible people are and knows not to trust them. Yeah she makes mistakes. She's been locked up for most of her life, of course she's not going to know how to react or behave as a person who didn't go through all she did. I don't typically leave reviews but I felt this one deserved one. Take the chance. Read it. It's not a happy go lucky book. All her problems don't get solved in a few short chapters where she gets to live this happy life. This her fighting for the lives of herself and the people she loves and making mistakes but those mistakes comes with lessons that do help form her into the witch she's ultimately going to be.

This book drove me insane! Why does Lilly keep repeating the same behavior. The characters that rescue Lilly are irredeemable. The book just keeps repeating the horrible pattern of abuse, caging, and using Lilly. Will not read anymore from this series.

from the first paragraph it grabbed me by the throat, I sat on the edge from the beginning every event having me gasp in despair. I couldn't stop reading and wondering how much more terror, despair, and horror I could handle. My family thought I was losing my mind growling and cursing at the kindle in my hands as I read.

This book didn't really make sense. The abuse, the trauma and the characters are two weird to be believed. The main character Lilly, well she deserves to be a hot mess but she was also a roller coaster of nonsense. SO MUCH CRYING.

This book has everything and more!!! Lilly is soooo strong; I loved her character and how bada$$ she is. I loved the “world” this described and how she is the last of her kind! I hate Toby and Grayson!!!! Ugh... So many emotions after finishing this book. I need to start the second book now!

Ps: several triggers in this book.. Lots of blood and pain!

I haven't read another story like this one. It has a little bit of everything and gripped me to the end. If you like dark romance with dynamic characters this is for you.

“The Last Witch” follows Lilly Hooper as she steps into a new world—out of her uncle’s basement and into a mansion with other witches. Told she is a monster all her life, beaten and abused in quite literally every way imaginable, Lilly is discovering that the magic in her veins is limitless, and she hasn’t even learned all the powers there are yet. But with great power come lots of men who want to use that power—and her—in order to further their own goals: one wants to return magic to the world while the other wants to eradicate it completely and destroy those who would have magic if it did return in force—and neither is the good guy. Caught between these opposing sides, Lilly also finds love and friendship, and even has her very first Christmas that she can remember. Which all sounds great, honestly! So, what was my problem with this book when the premise sounds so promising? The stereotypical shallowness of the characters, and the overly gratuitous nature of the violence, to be frank.

Lilly is painted to be the most tragic character ever, like honestly anything bad that can happen to this girl does. Her mom dies when she’s young, she’s abandoned by her father and then left in the clutches of a sadistic uncle who hates her and beats and starves her for the majority of her life. She is tortured emotionally and physically, and sexually abused multiple times by different men, which include rape. I also feel it’s important to mention, because it can be so triggering for people, that there’s a character that has a very violent (aided) miscarriage. I won’t go into details because of spoilers, but honestly, the themes of sexual violence come up all the time in this book across multiple character and it’s barely alluded to in the synopsis, so I feel it’s only fair to warn people. This book is beyond just a dark fantasy, it’s really not for the faint of heart at all, which I would have been fine with. I don’t mind violence or really dark fantasies (which sounds weird to say but go with me on this one) but there HAS to be a point to it beyond the very basic “tragic heroine back story” trope or the “sexist male dominance” trope. Which is why the sheer amount of abuse Lilly undergoes felt repetitive and gratuitous after a little while.

Which unfortunately does lead into the characters… Every man in this book, save two, are awful people. And the two decent ones, one of them I just couldn’t buy as a love interest. The characters do a lot of pining for each other but there never seemed to be a depth to their feelings beyond physical. Even when they learn about each other’s terrible pasts, because they weren’t fully developed (which was odd given the length of this book), I always felt like I was kept at arm’s length from being swept up in their romance. Plus, Lilly tended to give me whiplash for 70% of the story; going from a type of terrified damsel to a force to be reckoned with that won’t take anything from anyone. It would have been fine if it had been a gradual change, going from the victim to the survivor, but Lilly goes back and forth too much to make it feel like true character growth. Not to mention that most of the characters tend to yell in all caps in dialogue. This may be a personal preference, but after a while, I couldn’t take the characters anger seriously, and I found the sheer number of caps to be distracting.

The premise of this book is genuinely interesting. A world where powerful witches have cut off the flow of magic to the world through a veil in order to protect their people from relentless Hunters, and the only one who can lower the veil is an Arcane witch, someone who can access all types of magic. There was so much potential and drama that could come with that plotline! But the book dragged, focusing too much on a chaotic love story and not enough on the bigger struggle. Lilly never really tried to learn her magic, she was just able to do more as she was abused more and more… That seemed to be the only point to the unyielding violence Lilly suffers, and at first, that made sense, but after a while the repetitiveness of it becomes desensitizing to where I was just getting bored. But, based on the sheer number of glowing reviews this book and series has, I am clearly in the minority with my feelings, so you may enjoy this more than I did! But because this story ended up dragging, the shallowness of the characters wrapped up in non-stop violence, and abuse of all kinds, but with sprinklings of an interesting underlining plotline, I’m giving this book 2 stars. Thank you to the author for providing me with a copy for an honest review!

A young woman who is rescued from a basement where she has been chained for years. She is a witch with a gap in her memory, rescued by a coven of witches who wish to use her evolving powers to prevent those who want to destroy their coven. A gory battle and a great novel