Book Review: Salt & Storm
Title: Salt & Storm
Author: Kendall Kulper
Rating: 🍵🍵🍵🍵.5
You don’t know what you must give up to become a witch.
Avery Roe wants only to claim her birthright as the witch of Prince Island and to make the charms that have kept the island’s sailors safe at sea for generations, but instead she is held prisoner by her mother in a magic-free life of proper manners and respectability.
Avery thinks escape is just a matter of time, but when she has a harrowing nightmare, she can see what it means: She will be killed. She will be murdered. And she’s never been wrong before.
Desperate to change her future, Avery finds a surprising ally in Tane—a tattooed harpoon boy with magic of his own, who moves her in ways she never expected. But as time runs out to unlock her magic and save herself, Avery discovers that becoming a witch requires unimaginable sacrifice.
This recommendation is a long way coming.
I read SALT & STORM before it was published and have since been trying to put into words how I feel about this book. I don’t know that I really managed, but I tried.
Here’s a thing you have to know about me: I love witches. Their magic, their stories, their strange darkness. So I picked up SALT & STORM craving what I liked, but afraid I was going to be disappointed.
I wasn’t. Oh boy, I was not.
SALT & STORM is Kendall Kulper’s debut novel, a deeply atmospheric story about Avery, a sea witch determined to take over the family job of being the witch of the Island. It has whalers. It has magic. It has complex characters. It has Tane.
And I know I usually start with blabbering about my favorite characters, but this time we’re taking a small detour. Let’s talk about my actual favorite thing in SALT & STORM: Magic.
Kendall Kulper has a way of writing magic systems were it makes perfect sense without being info-dumpy, taking small details and weaving them through the story, letting the reader put it together. And it works. Avery’s sea witch magic felt like the waves themselves: flowing, vicious, out of reach. Her special abilities both exhilarating and terrible.
And then there’s Tane, the tattoo’d harpoon boy, who storms into Avery’s life and brings a very different kind of magic with him. His magic is warm, sacred, binding. Tane’s magic wraps around you in a hug that could conform or kill.
Suffice to say that I was extremely impressed with the handling of the magic in this book. As you can tell by all my gushing.
Of course, a beautifully planned magic system would be nothing without good characters to carry its weight, and Avery and Tane certainly do. They are the type of characters that I like separately, but so much more together. Characters who are sort of antagonistic but end up being partners in crime are my weakness. Avery and Tane were my weakness.
The secondary characters were fleshed-out as well, in a way that you could see their motivations but where always left wondering who to trust. Avery’s Grandmother (the current witch), her mom (a deserter), Tane’s family–all felt like real people, all weighted in the story. Even Avery’s prophetic dream, while not a character, felt like a true force, a looming threat.
At the end, Kendall Kulper manages to take all her threads and pull them tight and break my heart in the process. I would come back for more.
- Adriana
Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown Books for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review originally posted at A (Secret) Book Nook.
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