This is PG-13 rated femdom. No, I am not kidding, someone has managed to get a three book deal from a mainstream publisher for a no sex young adult aimed romantasy series about a trio of evil witches and the subs that love them.
Lest you think I am just inferring from the setting, no, I do mean this is an intentionally kinky book. In the scenes in which the two leads (Saskia, research witch) and Fabian (aka Felix, nobleman in disguise) discuss their feelings, with each other or in their heads it is expressed in terms of his submission. The scenes of fooling around are written entirely as consensual physical domination. But, there’s no sex in page or even a fade to black and the text gives you one stark “fuck” as far as cuss words. This is explicitly appropriate for who this book is aimed for, a person aged 12-18.
The reading level, likewise, took me about three hours (including a break) to zip through it. Tonally, it lands 100% in the current trends for Cozy and Villain-Is-Actually-Hero. This is about youthful wish fulfillment and vicarious ambition, defying your wicked guardians and coming into your own power. Also getting to be goth and spooky while you do it.
And it’s neat, because it both underlines the femdom-hiding-in-plain-sight thing I keep going on about and suggests a market of increasing tolerance. With a small mountain of books (YA or otherwise) where the heroine has to struggle to understand the moody supernatural male and navigate his power they implied threat of that, it’s good that I can go into a Barnes and Noble spot a book where the heroine is maybe a little menacingly clutching the hero’s face with her hand and have it actually deliver.
Nonetheless, I think it’s worth going into this review to also point out that if there wasn’t a clear flag of potential Femdom on the cover I wouldn’t have bought the book. While it was true I read a lot of this kind of fantasy when I was the primary age this is aimed at (in my day it was Dealing with Dragons, Myth Adventures, etc…), but I am pretty old. My wish fulfillment wants are now those of middle aged marrieds. I don’t want to defy my parents anymore, I have to think about them dying and what it says for my own mortality. I don’t need to realize the power was in me all along, I have to think about how to navigate passing the things I built on and symbolic or literal parenting. Young me would have gobbled “Wooing The Witch Queen” up and added it to her head library. Older me has to go into what is ultimately a positive review with the awareness my biggest criticisms are all aspects of it that are Not Written For Me.
So, before I do my usual grumpy fussing, let’s first talk about the unequivocally good parts. Fabien/Felix, our male lead, gets to be hot and useful. He doesn’t need to be cast as some sort of weirdo that he finds our heroine Saskia fascinating. Indeed I suppose there’s one wish this book did fulfill, it’s living in a world where women can be dominant and not have the entire narrative structure say “WHAT A SHOCKING REVERSAL OF ROLES!!!”. It’s like when you are queer you get very tired of coming out stories, even if that’s part of the larger queer experience. This also isn’t a gender flip story where he has to be more feminine to permit her to dominate, it’s just one where being attracted to villain coded people or wanting someone to kneel for you is equal opportunity.
While I told you there was no on page sex, there is, what I would describe as a very well done emphasis on flirting and starting to initiate as a domme, written with a good balance of situational chemistry and emphasis on consent. A main conflict is that after the leads determine they are into each other, Fabian/Felix still needs to reveal he’s actually in disguise and not the person she assumes him to be. But there’s a lot of on page yearning, pressing up against each other and touching with the offer of domination if the other party wants to lean into that while still leaving them room to back out.
Seriously, this is what I mean when I say that BDSM is often unfairly over sexualized in a way it doesn’t need to be. Nothing lewd happens here, in the entire book. At closest, the word “aroused” is used once, but we get no specifics. It might as well be a synonym for attracted. And, in the inevitable HEA, the characters are cuddled in bed together, but the description is so scrupulously free of even the suggestion they are naked that you might as well assume the male lead was reading some more of his poetry to the heroine. That’s actually kind of refreshing. D/s is permitted to be just what some people want by default.
However, now I do need to put my caveats. The biggest one is an accidental side effect of the fact our hero spends most of his time completely swathed in fabric. When our hero flees to the titular Witch Queen’s domain seeking sanctuary, thanks to a fortuitous choice in cloak he is mistaken for a Dark Wizard and promptly hired to staff. Our heroine, for plot convenient reasons, refuses to look under his hood. Shortly after this introduction, his disguise is added to with a mask the last Dark Wizard left behind. That’s just a vocation in this world, mysterious shrouded magical figure of menace. The problem here is that the text also keeps having everyone reacting to him like he is stunningly hot. Of course when you have a character essentially wearing a niqab for three quarters of the book that doesn’t preclude communicating chemistry in other ways. You could emphasize his posture, the bits that show like his eyes, talk about scent, or pad things with sparkling dialogue. Hell, you could just describe the cape itself as intriguing.
Wooing the Witch Queen doesn’t. It’s the world’s slowest strip tease, from masked to half mask, from cape to a formal suit and bare face. But, even when the characters have a moment of being pressed together, the narrative stays perfectly coy about specifics. It tells you this is a very alluring scenario, but it doesn’t show why. One can do asexual alternatives to stereotypical attraction without completely jettisoning sensory specifics.
Additionally, there were places where the elements I will call Cozy wore a bit thin. For example, our Witch Queen, Saskia, lives in a castle full of monstrous staff. They are of course, Just Misunderstood by bigoted humans, but in addition to that, they are slavishly dedicated to serving the leads. This is unlike the other two secondary plots: Saskia navigating that her First Minister is her ex girlfriend, and her reluctant friendship with the extremely extra other two Villain Queens she is in alliance with. Both are storylines where the motivations of the characters are more complicated. The Troll housekeeper and major domo, not so much, for all they constantly demand appeasement. While I get that having surrogate parents who are endlessly giving of every domestic comfort is a fair fantasy to have, it would have been nice to let the Trolls or the Goblins have wants and needs more personlike. One more plot about the monsters wanting something more than you to eat their perfectly made scones and to get enough sleep (or maybe making the Trolls/Goblins more morally grey) would have fixed this.
And yet, for all of that, this book didn’t collapse too far into the problems that many Cozy books do, of destroying their own stakes to save their sweetness. The tension with Mirjana, the First Minister, made sense given that she both led the rebellion that put Saskia on the throne and is doing the actual day to day business of running the country. I also admit I made the mistake of thinking she was actually a sentient magic mirror until she showed up in person (I mean, her name is right there! Also she’s obsessed with Sakia’s public image!), but I found the conflict was a plausible problem and the resolution worked, even if I am sort of sympathizing with Mirjana here more than maybe the narrative wanted me to. I also likewise didn’t find the way the threat of invasion ended too was convenient. Cozy books are going to magically have a reason why you need to take the army on your border (or the villain threatening your goals) seriously, yet also not have a single person die. Without going too far into spoilers, the book did a good technical job of building to a zero bloodshed resolution that didn’t feel like it was just handed to the heroes.
And I think the best endorsement I can give is that I do plan to buy the next book in the series when it comes out. I expect pretty much more of the same, (cozy, but no sex) since Queen Lorelai of the Fairies spent a good part of her dialogue making sure we knew how much she loathed her future love interest and vamping about being a man eater without talking about precisely what she was doing, but I am absolutely here to see how Burgis pulls it off.