Just in time for summer's transition into fall comes this haunting fairytale! Releasing September 23rd, 2025. Thank you to NetGalley for early access!
All Nefele knows is life on the island. Orphaned there as a young girl, she grows up alone with only the island's mysterious elks and a tower full of old diaries to guide her. She knows the island is shaping her into the legendary witch, cursed to remain imprisoned there for eternity. But just when Nefele has accepted the future, the arrival of a mysterious sailor throws everything she thought she knew off balance.
The Castaway and the Witch by Ionna Papadopoulou has all the trappings of a fairytale: morals and metaphors to chew on, magic shaped by wishes, and characters who are meant to learn their lesson. The world and characters of the book are beautiful and lush. Nefele is complex, torn between living the life prescribed by the island and the one she really wants. Her journey over the course of the book feels real, and I think readers will be able to empathize with the feeling of being stuck in cycles that feel pre-written whether for comfort or out of fear. In the acknowledgement, Papadopoulou writes that some of the characters in the book reflect her own desires to escape into lives that seem simpler or preordained instead of the difficult reality we wake up to each morning. The book really grapples with that, and with what it means to choose the difficult path anyway.
However, despite the strong worldbuilding, characters, and plot... the book felt like a bit of a drag. No matter how concentrated I was on what was happening on the page, each paragraph seemed to slip out of my focus and I'd have to reread some passages three or four times to make sense of them. This was especially prevalent around the big or magically charged moments of the book. Time also passed oddly in the book, which was understandable, as the book covers a span of about nine years if not more, but which added to the confusion. As a result, the book's 162 pages feel a lot longer. I'd like to imagine that all these elements were used purposefully, to add to the very personal and confusing (or "cerebral" as the author called it) journey that Nefele goes on, but they also made the plot harder to follow, and difficult to pick up once I'd lost the thread.
Still, I think that the book is worth checking out if you're following the trend of myth and fairytale retellings that is taking over book review spaces. The tropical and treacherous landscape of the book is also a perfect transitional read for this period between summer and fall, providing just enough of both soft summery vibes and frankly gruesome scenes to walk that line easily. And outside of the occasionally clunky or confusing writing, Papadopoulou's big ideas shine, and readers will definitely come away thinking about the morals and messages she explores throughout the novel.
Read this if you liked: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, anything by Gail Carson Levine, One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig
Thanks for reading!
See you next time,
Aleks
Book Information
Title: The Castaway and the Witch
Author: Ionna Papadopoulou
Published: 23 September, 2025
Publisher: Ghost Orchid Press
Format: digital, reviewed through NetGalley
Pages: 162
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