Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis: Review by Liz Bourke
Wooing the Witch Queen, Stephanie Burgis (Bramble 978-1250359599, $19.99, 304pp, tp) February 2025.
Given my hit-and-miss track record with fantasy romances – a record far more miss than hit – I didn’t expect to enjoy Stephanie Burgis’s Wooing the Witch Queen nearly as much as it turns out I did. But this playful, tongue-in-cheek, not-exactly enemies-to-lovers romp won me over with astonishing rapidity.
Felix von Estarion is an Archduke of the Serafin Empire. Brought up to be decorative and entirely useless for the business of ruling his principality of Estarion by Count von Hertzendorff, the cunning and brutally abusive regent who is now his First Minister, with the death of his wife, the aforesaid regent’s daughter, his time as a living archduke might well be coming to an end. But Felix’s widowerhood also means he has nothing to lose, and no one who can be punished in his stead. He resolves to flee across the border, where a great and terrible Witch Queen has overthrown her uncle and cast back the forces of Felix’s own archduchy with the aid of powerful magic. If he throws himself at her mercy, she might be able to protect him from his former regent. Or she might kill him, but in any event, he’ll deny the Count the satisfaction of controlling him any longer.
Saskia’s uncle usurped her and lived to regret it. She overthrew him in turn, after an adolescence in hiding, with the aid of the nonhuman people who took her in and supported her when she fled her uncle’s court, and the power of her great magic. Her support for nonhumans and other magical creatures only enhances her wickedness in the eyes of the prejudiced Serafin Empire, of course. But Saskia, while embracing the moniker and aesthetics of Witch Queen in order to achieve her goals, would far rather dedicate herself to magic and alchemy and protecting her people than to ruling – she appointed a competent First Minister and retired to remote Kadaric Castle, near the border with Estarion, the better to maintain the magical shield that guards the border. She’s recently had her majordomo advertise for a competent wizard to take up employment in organising her library, but wizards are dreadfully self-important and irritating, and when a man draped in a heavy black hooded cloak shows up at her castle and manages to be, of all things, courteous and polite, she awards this ‘‘Fabian’’ the job without so much as waiting to find out whether he was actually there to apply for it.
Felix is not a dark wizard, but he finds himself impersonating one. He had meant to come clean, but that was before he overheard Saskia discussing how much she hated the Archduke of Estarion – him – and his policies, and how willing she was to kill him, with two other closely allied magic-wielding queens. Fortunately, his impractical education in poetry and languages has, in fact, rendered him well-suited for the task of organising a magical library, and although the rest of the staff are intimidating, they’re also surprisingly welcoming – and willing to facilitate him remaining masked and cloaked as a quirk of his dark wizardly nature.
Saskia herself is also a surprise to him, as he is to her. Neither of them expected to find themselves caring for each other – to find each other funny, sweet, interesting, and attractive – but day by day, these two lonely people with deep-rooted insecurities are finding that they bring out the best in each other.
Alas, Saskia’s uncle is still alive and enjoying the support of the Count von Hertzendorff for his attempt to retake Saskia’s throne. The Count has not admitted that no one knows where Felix is, so Saskia remains under the impression that all this – including the assassination attempts – is being done with his sanction, even as she and her allied queens (and her First Minister, her ex-lover Mirjana, who really thought that by now Saskia would have decided to be a more conventional monarch and is a little frustrated that she hasn’t) prepare for further conflict. Being unmasked is likely to only become more awkward for Felix the longer his deception goes on – especially if he’s unmasked by one of Saskia’s allies.
This novel is incredibly fun. Burgis is playing with broad fantasy tropes and fairytale motifs in a setting whose political structures recollect the early modern Holy Roman Empire – a context in which many fairy tales were first collected and written down. The world is not sketched in great depth, but what we see largely makes sense, and the playful, humorous undertone offers a great deal of leeway. Yet the emotional core of the novel is treated seriously: Relationships between people are central. Felix and Saskia’s relationship plays out in a sweet, awkward, and entertaining dance. They comfort each other and build each other up, and this is the cornerstone of what they are to each other. The eventual revelation of Felix’s identity proves the catalyst that drives the resolution of the nonromance plot in a satisfying way.
Yet I particularly enjoyed the other relationships in the novel, particularly Saskia’s relationship with Mirjana. It would have been easy to cast Mirjana as a grasping, manipulative ex, someone who sees Saskia as a means to an end, but though their relationship as queen and First Minister is filled with conflict and misunderstanding, they’re genuinely working towards the same goal. The relationships that Felix develops with other members of the household, including the majordomo and housekeeper, who stand in a quasiparental relation to Saskia, are also sweet and touching: Felix was never allowed to have friends, and his developing connections are allowing him to grow into himself.
The aesthetics are delightful, too. Blazing skulls, a witch queen with a crown of thorns attended by a cloud of crows – honestly, I had so much fun reading Wooing the Witch Queen that I can hardly wait for Burgis’s next novel in this setting.
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Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus
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