Ah, Truthwitch. The truth is, you let me down. 
 Did you see that? 'The truth is'. Because she's a Truthwitch! So it's like a pun! 
 You know when you can just feel yourself being really annoying, and you can tell the people around you are getting sick of you, but you just cannot stop? I usually get like that when I'm extremely bored, and so I caught myself doing it a lot as I was reading Truthwitch: knowing that I need to finish this, but being bored out of my mind, and so compelled to scratch away at the patience of anyone near me until I'm very firmly told to shut up. 
 Truthwitch, for me, absolutely bombed; it was boring, the characters were flat, the prose was weak, and above all, it may as well have been written in Amharic for how well I understood it. This is my absolute number one complaint about this book. I can cope with weird, dull, angry Merik, and Safi who shares my trait of being unable to stop annoying people. I can deal with flat, dreary Iseult and all of the hundreds of thousands of politicians whose names I can't remember. I can cope with the numerous typos, the cliched elemental magic system, and the generic romance. But what I am not willing to overlook is the absolute shambles that is the world-building in this high fantasy novel. 
 This is a genre that revolves around world-building. And if you can't even be FUCKED to explain huge key elements of that world-building, then how in the fresh hell are you going to manage to string together a competent plot? Spoiler: you aren't. Because the total disaster that was Truthwitch rests within the fact that nobody, not even the characters inside the story, knows what the fuck is going on. 
 Cahr Awen? Origin Wells? Cleaving? The Void? All of these things are very important parts of Truthwitch's world-building as a whole, but they remain a total mystery at the end of the book. I mean, cleaving is a little clearer, but the rules of it are all over the place, and we never get an explanation of what it actually is and what causes it. Origin Wells? No idea whatsoever. Cahr Awen? What is the Cahr Awen? (view spoiler)[I have a feeling that this might be Safi and Iseult's "destiny" but there's never ever any hint as to what that is. Aren't we supposed to know what the fuck the destiny is when the heroes go after it? (hide spoiler)] 
 Threadfamilies, Threadstones, Threads in general? The Puppeteer? The evil dude in the village with the people and stuff? Nope. Didn't get it. Because it's all just walloped at you at warped speed within the first three or so chapters, and there are info dumps the size of the Glasgow O2, and I can't believe that I read the whole thing. I seriously can't. I was this close to throwing in the towel at around the 200 page mark but I made a commitment to finish every book I start during this reading challenge. No skipping, no switching, and no two books at once. Start one, you finish it. 
 Oh, but there's a catch with that, my friends. After being ahead of the game from the start, I nearly fell behind because this book took me a week to read. Almost all of the books I've started since the beginning of this challenge have taken me two to three days, mostly two, some taking longer because I still have to keep up with my own writing and I still have to go to work during the day. But this book took me seven days. Seven days, people! I was just to tired of it, so tired that I feel asleep about four times while I was reading it. Just conked right out on the couch. It was probably supposed to be energetic and fun and shit, with all of the action scenes, but I hate action scenes. Character A punched and Character B kicked and simply reading descriptions of moving body parts does nothing for me. I get that fight scenes sometimes need to happen, but don't just bung them in there because you need to prove how "badass" your protagonist is. You can write fight scenes with plot, you know. You can do it. It is possible. 
 But the plot of this book suffers, because the world-building is so bananas. At first glance it seems like the plot is twisting and turning and powering forward, until you get to a certain point and realize... Well, shit. Nothing is actually happening, is it? There's some chasing, and a thing about a wedding and that bloody trade agreement (Merik, shut the fuck up about your trade agreement. Nobody cares) but it all just sort of peters out, and then at the last minute a totally unrelated conflict headed by a totally unrelated villain comes in to play and it was so incredibly random that I'm laughing as I think about it. I felt like I was supposed to be...shocked? Saddened? I think I was supposed to feel something at the turn of the last page, but it was really just a case of "oh, okay." 
 You could say that about everything in this book. "Oh. Okay." It was just so lacklustre, so repetitive and weird and stuffed with unnecessary charging around. Safi and Iseult and Merik just blast from place to place, and every now and again they'll be like "We're almost there! It's imperative that we reach [location that has never been mentioned before]!" And there's no way to react to that, other than, "Oh. Okay." 
 Amid all of the shouting and the racing around and the relentlessly hurling unexplained fantasy concepts at the reader, this book just falls right on its ass. It wanted to be epic and amazing, and it probably makes sense to some people, but I'm not prepared to make excuses for it. I paid PS15 for this, and all I got was a clusterfuck sandwich. How is that fair? 
 One and a half stars for you, Truthwitch. And all of it's for Aeduan. He deserves better.