The Witch’s Market

The Witch’s Market by Mingmei Yip

322 Pages

Publisher: Kensington Books, Kensington

Release Date: November 24, 2015

Fiction (Adult), General Fiction (Adult), Witches, Chinese, Canary Islands

Eileen Chen, lives in San Francisco and just turned 33. She asked her sister, Brenda, to throw her a witch themed birthday party. She is an assistant professor but wants to be an associate professor. To do that, she must publish a book. Since her field is anthropology, her mentor suggests she research witches and write about them. She is in an on-again-off-again relationship with Ivan, a wealthy businessman.

She decides to take a leave of absence from the school and goes to the Canary Islands where she hears many stories about witches living there. She visits the Witch’s Market, meets a group of bad witches, finds a castle with an underground dwelling, and an abandoned village. While there, she is proposed to three times.

The book is written in third person point of view, the characters are not very developed, and the pace is slow. There were several times while reading this book I thought it was a young adult book, but the main character is thirty-three. It is obvious the author is not familiar with modern day witchcraft since her character traveled half across the world when she could have found witches right in San Francisco where she lived. There are discussion questions in the back of the book and one of them asked the reader if witches do exist. I say, yes, they do.