The Witches' Kitchen: Book Review

• Author: Allen Williams  
• First Published: 2010  
• Genre: Fantasy  
• Rating: ★★☆  

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be trapped in the dark, twisted, and enchanted kitchen of witches who have evil intentions towards you? Then this is the book for you! Welcome to The Witches' Kitchen, where everything is trying to eat or destroy you, you happen to make a few friends, and - oh! - don't forget, you're a magical toad.

This book has been on my shelf -again- for around a decade, and unlike A Company of Swans I can understand why I left this one for so long. There was so much promise in the premise of this book that it did not deliver on. Everything seemed a little too convenient, a little too fast paced, and too many characters and things coming out of nowhere, many of which held no significant value to the story. While this book is considered Young Adult, I would recommend it more to children, maybe 10-13, just because of some of the vocabulary used.

It's hard to explain this one without giving too many spoilers, but where it lacked for me most was in the storytelling itself. I wanted details where there were none, especially about the kitchen and this world, only the author referred to most things in vague terms, and even when elements would change, such as lighting, he would add detail as if everything were foggy, so you still didn't have much to go off of. The author also alludes to dangerous and terrifying creatures in the kitchen, but I don't know that we actually met any, and if we did, they were very lackluster and uninteresting. Some characters talked about having families and clans in this kitchen, yet we never met any more of their kind, nor did we encounter any other intelligent creatures, only those which seemed to be experiments of the witches, which given that this kitchen is supposed to by small, yet deceptively large, didn't make sense to me either. These sorts of pitfalls and contradictions are what really took me out of this story.

Now, this isn't to say that the story wasn't entertaining at times. Sure, when they got into spats and exciting moments were happening, one could forget - for a moment - about some of these pitfalls, but then something would always break that illusion and would lose me again. I understand that for some people, these sorts of issues are not a make-or-break for a book as long as it was entertaining, but for me I found that it burned more than it mended, and therefore I wouldn't recommend this to anyone this spooky Halloween season.

Do you agree? Have you read this before? What are you reading this Halloween?

Cheers!