Welcome Back, Booklovers! Shadow Coven is the sequel to last year's The Witchery, a novel I had mixed feelings about. However I liked Iris and Thalia's stories enough to see it through and I'm a sucker for a witchy fantasy. I received an arc from Scholastic in exchange for an honest review.
Thalia's conservative Christian pastor father is hunting her down and she suspects killing other witches in the process. Trent is uncovering some secrets about his mother and himself. Iris and Matthew are contact by death himself to do his bidding. Logan is still trying to come into her powers. Jailah is doing an internship with the Witchery Council that leads to her learning some classified information.
One of my biggest critiques with The Witchery was about giving the six main characters their own povs. Because there were so many of them every character didn't seem to get equal attention and it made their storylines feel more drawn out. At first this book felt loosely connecting with each character going through their own personal battles. Jailah and Trent did have more of a presence and purpose this time which I appreciated. However I still wasn't convinced about Logan's presence as a pov character when she mainly seemed to be present to use her whiteness to get into spaces the other girls could not. Matthew's storyline is still so intertwined with Iris' that I wasn't solely convinced we needed his pov either. But this book had more of what I wanted to see in book 1 with characters being fleshed out better.
The book reads like a teen fantasy show but I can't help but think balancing a large cast like this would've been easier in a graphic novel. It took a little bit of time for me to get into this especially since it starts at the end of the school year. In book one, I felt the world's knowledge of witchery wasn't clear enough and it's explained in more detail here. At a time when Florida schools are regularly featured in the news surrounding discussions of what students are permitted to learn it's easy to see the parallels here with Mesmortes, the school the coven attends.
I did end up switch to the audiobook a little after the midway mark which is also where the book started to pick up the pacing and momentum. Accents aside the narration was great. I'm someone who usually doesn't like to listen to fantasy because I find it hard to keep interested and understand what's happening. But S. Isabelle manages to make this book engaging without feeling convoluted despite the various plots happening at once.
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