WITHOUT WORDS by Mae Thorn
Fiction, Fantasy
3***
Blurb: Enter the world of witches and lose your pound of flesh… Cassandra Poole loses her hearing when an alluring stranger touches her in her family’s apothecary. With her loss, she gains the ability to detect witches, but she will stop at nothing to find a cure, even if it means turning over other witches to the witch hunter, Lord Lyme. Niko Moore, the stranger, has powerful empathic abilities. He wants witches to remain free to cherish their abilities, but he must stand against the woman he has fallen for or risk betraying his fellow witches. Cassandra must choose who to trust, risking more than her hearing but also her humanity.
THOUGHTS: I was really looking forward to this book and disappointed that it just did not work for me. The premise was intriguing and the fact that the main character became deaf when she became a witch was fascinating. When you gain your powers, you lose some other part of you.
The main character, Cassandra, is touched by a strange man and loses her hearing, but gains a strange power. When she touches someone, she can tell if they’re witch or human. That power comes into play when she is to the Lyme estate. Cassandra makes the mistake multiple times on who to trust.
The witch hunting scenes should come with a warning (as should the addiction subject). The hunting scenes were bloody and gory – and even more so later when Cassandra returned to the forest. Had I known about the brutality in this story, I probably would not have read it.
The premise, as said, was intriguing. But the play out just did not work for me. And that is just my opinion. Many other reviewers loved it. Reviewing is very subjective. Not everybody likes everything. I will note this, the writing was intense enough that parts of it really bothered me and that means that the author did her job of making me feel something.
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