The book I chose to review is The Black Witch by Laurie Forest. What really stood out to me about this book, compared to other young adult fantasy books, was the protagonist, Elloren Gardner, and her character arc. This book has your basic young adult plot where the main character sparks some sort of revolution or fights back against the established government. Elloren is the granddaughter of the last prophesied Black Witch who held immense power and helped protect the Gardnerian people. This book contains several fantasy races, the Garderian people essentially having the most power and also being the most bigoted against other races. They were the One and everyone else were the Other. 
This book has your basic young adult plot where the main character sparks some sort of revolution or fights back against the established government, but she had the most astounding and very realistic transition and transformation. Elloren Gardner had only ever been around Gardnerians and she had lived her life in a position of power and advantage. Therefore, she had the privilege of being ignorant to her society’s ever growing problems, despite her overall good intentions. However, once she begins to attend a prestigious university in the capital where people from all types of different fantasy races learned, she experiences racial tension and witnesses real discrimination. She then goes through this very realistic amount of growth where she learns to educate herself and break outside of her own echo chamber. By the end, she becomes this self aware activist who uses her privilege and power to help those who don’t. After reading it, I felt it was extremely relevant and fitting to today’s political climate. Even if this was a work of fantasy and fiction with fake peoples and races, the racist and discriminatory ideologies and workings were the same and I feel that the readers, including myself, could learn a thing or two from her transformation. This book is a little controversial and the author received a bit of backlash from it because people thought she condoned these racist ideologies. However, it doesn’t make any sense to me because she wrote about very real problems that our own society has. The world she created isn’t a utopia, just like how our own world is far from one too, and she purposefully had it reflect our own society, and quite accurately I would say. I think the author wanted us to rethink our own journeys of learning and changing the way we think about the world around us and the people and cultures we encounter. I certainly did since I resonated deeply with Elloren and her journey to discover her own power and privilege and what she could constructively do with it. It was a reminder for myself to check my own privilege and I’m sure was a reminder for other readers as well.
“People see what they expect to see […] through a filter of their own hatred and prejudice.”
– The Black Witch