I'm a bit apprehensive about this one. I loved the first three books or so as a child, then I grew up before my local library had a chance to acquire the rest of the series, and now I'm trying to make up for it. This is the first book that expands the setting from the English countryside, and I'm just not sure about it. I feel like that's the setting in which these stories work best, but I'll give it a chance. And while I kind of like Grimalkin as a character, I'm also not really enthusiastic about this introduction of "assassin witches". It feels like Delaney is taking this series from a fantasy series fairly grounded in English folklore, to, I don't know, a shounen anime. Not that I think he has watched a lot of those, but it starts to approach about that amount of realism and the same proportions of eerie spookiness to kick-ass fight scenes.

I generally really like Delaney's approach to witches as villains in these books, he managed to strike a great balance between making them genuinely frightening but also sympathetic. Drawing on a lot of older witch lore (if they're malevolent, they make pacts with the devil, are seductresses and grind baby bones for potions), he's aware enough of the misogynist ideas that were the foundation for many of these superstitions to address those too. You will not find many children's books, that clearly primarily target boys, that make realizing your mentor's sexism is ill-founded an ongoing point of character development. And yet, since when is wielding a knife what makes a witch so frightening? It's a very, ugh, dare I say, male way of approaching this. (I just realized that maybe it's relevant too that Grimalkin, the more sympathetic evil witch fights in a "typically male" way (pointy things) versus the other witches who use more feminine coded methods (seduction, manipulation))

Am I giving too much thought to a children's book? Yes. Will I stop? Never.

At least Mam and Alice are back, and they're always great. Plus, Grimalkin does genuinely promise to be a fun character, though not, in my opinion, because of her vast array of knives.