Book Review: A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

A few years ago, a YouTube I was following at that time recommended books to read during the fall months. One of those books was A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft.

At that time I wanted to read more books that were popular. In addition to the YouTuber recommending it, A Far Wilder Magic was one of the books that was pretty popular at that time. The plot interested me, so after a lot of thought and debate, I decided to buy the book and read it.

The book’s synopsis from Amazon is…

When Margaret Welty spots the legendary hala, the last living mythical creature, she knows the Halfmoon Hunt will soon follow. Whoever is able to kill the hala will earn fame and riches, and unlock an ancient magical secret. While Margaret is the best sharpshooter in town, only teams of two can register, and she needs an alchemist.

Weston Winters isn’t an alchemist―yet. He’s been fired from every apprenticeship he’s landed, and his last chance hinges on Master Welty taking him in. But when Wes arrives at Welty Manor, he finds only Margaret. She begrudgingly allows him to stay, but on one condition: he must join the hunt with her.

Although they make an unlikely team, they soon find themselves drawn to each other. As the hunt looms closer and tensions rise, Margaret and Wes uncover dark magic that could be the key to winning the hunt―if they survive that long.

In A Far Wilder Magic, Allison Saft has written an achingly tender love story set against a deadly hunt in an atmospheric, rich fantasy world that will sweep you away.

Just like what the blurb says, the book is very atmospheric. The descriptions of the world Margaret and Weston lives in is vivid and beautiful written. The written depictions of the events are also really well done. Overall, the book has a well thought out plot and was executed way that made transported the reader into the world of the book and keeps their attention. Since I read the book not by an audio book, but by reading a physical copy of the book, I really appreciate this. It is so hard to find a popular book from BookTok that is well written in a physical version. Fortunately, this book is one of them.

Even though I really like how well A Far Wilder Magic is written, I didn’t enjoy the whole book. The plot was interesting at first and it did a good job getting my attention, I started to struggle with parts of it. There is violence in the book, which I knew it would be present in the book due to the hunt. The violence is, like the whole book, well described which did bother me at times. It is one of those things where if certain types of imagery upset you, it may be harder to read those sections of the book. The subject matter deals with other sensitive topics such as childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and poverty. (The poverty in the book is similar to what people from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s in New York City would have experienced) There is also an open door romance scene.

Although these parts of the plot may not bother some, it did bother me. Even though it prevented me from enjoying the book as much as I hoped, it was still tolerable enough for me to continue reading it. I did need to skip paragraphs and pages to avoid them. The biggest worry I had about skipping around in this book is that I may have inadvertently skipped over important parts of the story. In certain parts, this turned out to be true. So, I had to read the parts I didn’t want to read in order to make the rest of the story make sense.

To be honest, I feel conflicted about if I should recommend this book or not. For me, it wasn’t a five star read like I hoped it would be. The descriptions, world building, character building, and story telling aspects of it is extremely good. I love Allison’s way of world building and attention to detail. The fantasy adventure aspect of it is something I also enjoy and the pacing is really good as well. I just didn’t like some of the subject matter and how well described some of it… or that I needed to read through some of these parts or else the rest of the story wouldn’t make sense.

So, do I recommend this book? Yes, if you can handle reading through the parts of the book that I didn’t like. If you want to give this book a try because you hear Allison Saft is a really good writer, I would recommend it as well. She did such a really good job of writing A Far Wilder Magic that I think for the very serious and curious reader, it is worth a read.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!