Witch Crag by Kate Cann

Kita has grown up in a tribe of sheepmen whose only priority is to survive, sacrificing pleasure and having very traditional roles for both men and women that no-one disobeys. Kita desires freedom, to be able to see the outside world and not be penned in a cage looking after the little ones. Together with Quainy and Rath, she plans her escape which will take her through lands filled with terrifying creatures and dangerous people as they seek the uncertain safety of the nightmarish Witch Crag. But even if they make it into the tribe of the witches, will they be safe from their past and the war that threatens to destroy all that the various tribes have worked for?

The setting of a society with such traditional roles for men and women set in a future after a terrible event (called the Great Havoc) caught my attention as the other dystopian novels don't usually come across as being so strong in these roles and so I was curious to see how it would be done. It also promised the usual enemy becoming the true love which can sometimes add a good bit of drama. However, I found that Witch Crag didn't really deliver all that it promised. You never find out what the Great Havoc was and the whole plot felt very rushed which prevented either of the main plot promises from truly being developed. You never really got a feel for the world as the characters would be dropped into one event and then suddenly be experiencing another. Even the journey through the forest which started out so well, being nicely descriptive, soon gave way to the need to speed onto the next crisis. The relationships aren't very realistic either because of the pace - the characters trust and fall in love too easily, as well as lacking depth. The "enemy" isn't really ever a true enemy of Kita's and her romance isn't very detailed or long and occurs very suddenly.When a crisis occurs it happens very quickly and then the characters are extracted very conveniently and speedily, which just felt very unsatisfying and unrealistic. I also expected the book to end slightly further on from where it did and it almost felt like Cann just ran out of time and quickly brought things to a close. I think the idea for this book had great potential but might have been better served by being split into two books to allow for a good quantity of world building or sticking to one theme instead of trying to cover dystopia, adventure and the supernatural/fantasy as it all feels a bit forced and none are fully developed to a satisfying degree. On the plus side, it is nice to read a book that appears to be a standalone for a change as the teen market is saturated with so many series that I find it difficult to remember which ones I'm reading and what has happened in each one. 


Overall, if you're looking for a novel that will stand on its own with a dystopian flavour then this one will do just that. But if you're looking for something to fill the Hunger Games void in your life then you might want to try some of the other brilliant novels out there, such as Pure by Julianna Baggott, Divergent by Veronica Roth or Gone by Michael Grant.


I give it 6/10.


Title: Witch Crag
Author: Kate Cann
Publisher: Scholastic
Teenage Fiction


(Due to be published October 2012)