This is one of the times my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book.

Yes, you just read that with your own two eyes. They’re more accepting of intermarriage, and because of this, they’re hopelessly mixed.” Here’s a representative excerpt, an offending sentence juxtaposed with Sinyard’s commentary: It was this premise that led Sinyard to slam The Black Witch as “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind,” in a review that consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book’s racist characters saying or doing racist things. (It’s the first of a series one hopes that Elloren will be more woke in book two.) But when she goes off to college, she begins to question her beliefs, an ideological transformation she’s still working on when she joins with the rebellion in the last of the novel’s 600 pages. The Black Witch centers on a girl named Elloren who has been raised in a stratified society where other races (including selkies, fae, wolfmen, etc.) are considered inferior at best and enemies at worst. It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.” “It was ultimately written for white people. The hype train was derailed in mid-March, however, by Shauna Sinyard, a bookstore employee and blogger who writes primarily about YA and had a different take: “ The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read,” she wrote in a nearly 9,000-word review that blasted the novel as an end-to-end mess of unadulterated bigotry. The Black Witch, a debut young-adult fantasy novel by Laurie Forest, was still seven weeks from its May 1 publication date, but positive buzz was already building, with early reviews calling it “ an intoxicating tale of rebellion and star-crossed romance,” “ a massive page-turner that leaves readers longing for more,” and “ an uncompromising condemnation of prejudice and injustice.”

The Black Witch by Laurie Forest