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Verdict: A quick, likeable Salem witch mystery with an already-out lesbian heroine and a genuinely sharp portrait of a toxic ex, let down by thin characters, a romance that barely gets built and a mystery many readers saw coming.
Best for: Teen and adult readers who want a fast, low-stakes-on-the-page witchy whodunit with casual queer representation, and who will forgive archetypal characters for a brisk plot and a Salem backdrop.
Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — YA, kissing only)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.4/5 — a 3.70 Goodreads average across 39,000 ratings, with flat characters and a guessable villain as the recurring complaints)
Tropes: Secret witches, small-town mystery, toxic ex, new girl in town, hidden magic, coven politics, elemental magic, amateur sleuth, found family, first love.
These Witches Don’t Burn by Isabel Sterling is the first book of a completed two-book YA series from Razorbill, a contemporary paranormal fantasy and small-town mystery set in modern Salem, Massachusetts — where Hannah, an Elemental witch hiding in plain sight among the tourists, is forced to investigate a dark magical threat alongside the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart, just as a new girl named Morgan arrives in town.
It sits at a 3.70 average across roughly 39,000 Goodreads ratings and a higher 4.4 on Amazon, collected mixed-to-lukewarm trade notices from Kirkus and School Library Journal, and still circulates widely through libraries seven years after its May 2019 debut. The gap between the people who found it charming and the people who found it shallow is wider than that middling average suggests. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.
What Is These Witches Don’t Burn About?
These Witches Don’t Burn is young adult contemporary fantasy with a mystery engine — closer to lesbian romantic suspense than to romantasy, and pitched at readers of 14 and up. The setting does a lot of work before a page of plot happens: modern Salem is a town that sells witchcraft as a souvenir, which means the real witches living there have to hide inside a costume version of themselves. That irony is the book’s best idea, and the coven secrecy flows from it.
Hannah is already out as a lesbian when the book opens, and it is never an issue — what she lacks is closure. Her relationship with Veronica, a fellow witch in the same coven, has ended badly, and the book is candid about how badly. What Veronica assumes is that she can still pull Hannah back whenever it suits her. Morgan, the new girl, is the opposite pull: someone uncomplicated who knows nothing about magic, which is exactly the problem. It is all Hannah’s first-person narration, so you get her anger and her crush at full volume — and nobody else’s interior life.
What Makes This YA Sapphic Witch Mystery Work
- Representation without an issue plot: The most consistently praised element across the reviews. Hannah is out, her queerness is ordinary, and readers repeatedly name that as the reason they picked it up and the reason they recommend it.
- The Salem setting: Readers who liked it describe the tourist-town backdrop as atmospheric and fun, and it gives the secret-witch premise a built-in tension that a generic small town would not.
- The toxic ex: Smart Bitches, Trashy Books singled out the early chapters on Hannah and Veronica as the book’s emotional high point, and the author’s own content notes name the emotional abuse and gaslighting directly — this is the part with teeth.
- A magic system with types: Elemental witches, darker magic and the rules that separate them draw regular praise, and School Library Journal credited the system as original and rooted in mythology.
- Pace: At around 330 pages it moves, and readers who loved it describe it as a fast, suspenseful read — though “rushed” is the same quality seen from the other side.
Book Synopsis
Hannah is a witch — a real one, an Elemental, with fire and water and earth and air answering to her — and in Salem that is the one thing she can never say out loud. The town is full of plastic broomsticks and fortune tellers, and the actual witches live quietly underneath it, bound by a coven that takes secrecy very seriously. Hannah has spent her life keeping the two worlds apart.
Then the school year ends with a bonfire that goes wrong in a way no ordinary explanation covers. Hannah is sure that dark magic was involved, the kind her coven fears most, and she is equally sure that the adults in charge are moving too slowly. The only other witch her age who takes it as seriously is Veronica — the ex-girlfriend who hurt her, still orbiting her life and still in her coven. Working together means reopening everything Hannah has been trying to close.
At the same time, there is Morgan: new in town, a dancer, warm and funny and entirely outside the magical world. Being with Morgan means lying to her about almost everything, and as strange incidents begin to pile up around Salem, lying starts to look dangerous as well as unfair. Hannah has to work out who is using magic to hurt people, how far to trust the girl she used to love, and whether there is room in a life this secret for someone new.
My Review
The premise is excellent, and I want to say so first. Real witches hiding inside the world’s most commercialised witch town is the kind of idea that sells itself, and Sterling uses it well in the opening stretch: the secrecy has weight, the coven feels like a community with rules, and Hannah being a lesbian is just a fact about her rather than the plot. Readers name that first when they recommend it.
The second real strength is Veronica. The book is at its sharpest when it stays with Hannah and her ex — the manipulation, the way Veronica rewrites what happened between them, the way Hannah keeps being pulled back into a dynamic she knows is bad for her. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books called this the emotional core, and I agree: it is a clear-eyed picture of an emotionally abusive teenage relationship between two girls, which is rarer on the shelf than it should be.
Where it struggles is character depth, and this is not my personal gripe — it is the most repeated criticism in the Goodreads reviews I read, where reviewer after reviewer calls the cast flat or archetypal. Around that sit the structural complaints: a large group found the villain guessable; several describe the dialogue and prose as young or clunky; and the world-building stays shallow once the premise is established. Kirkus put it most bluntly, faulting the book for telling rather than showing.
One expectation to reset: this is a mystery with a romance in it, not a romance with a mystery in it. Morgan is the love interest on the cover copy, but Hannah’s strongest chemistry is with Veronica, and multiple reviewers say the new relationship goes from introduction to kissing to dating with very little tension in between. If “sapphic witch romance” is what drew you, calibrate; if you wanted a fast teen whodunit with a queer lead, this is closer to what you are getting.
My honest note: A great premise and a genuinely sharp toxic-ex thread, carried by a cast that never quite gets off the page. If you need rich characters or a mystery you cannot solve, this will frustrate you. If you want a quick, queer, witchy read with Salem as a backdrop, it does the job.
| Element | In These Witches Don’t Burn |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Hannah & Morgan — Elemental witch and non-magical new girl, first love; Hannah’s toxic ex Veronica is the stronger presence |
| Core tropes | Secret witches, small-town mystery, toxic ex, new girl in town, hidden magic, coven politics |
| Setting | Present-day Salem, Massachusetts — a tourist witch town with a real coven hiding underneath |
| Heat level | 1/5 — YA, kissing only |
| Series | These Witches Don’t Burn book 1 of 2 — main mystery resolves, sequel hook; duology complete |
| Content notes | Emotional relationship abuse and gaslighting, gun violence, arson and fire, death and grief, off-page animal death, blood and magical violence |
How Spicy Is These Witches Don’t Burn?
A 1/5, and that is a description rather than a criticism. romance.io does not index the book at all — the norm for young adult titles, and a useful signal that nobody is cataloguing it as romance. Kirkus lists it for ages 14 to 18 and School Library Journal for grade 9 up, and reader reports agree on what is actually on the page: kissing and dating, nothing further. Forever Young Adult gave the romance a 4 out of 10 on its swoon scale, which is about right.
The one thing worth flagging in advance is not heat but the Hannah-and-Veronica history, which the author’s own content notes describe as emotional relationship violence and gaslighting; a handful of readers wanted the book to reckon with Veronica’s behaviour more firmly than it does. No reviewer I found flags anything sexual beyond kissing. If you want other sapphic mysteries that keep the door closed, A Dark and Drowning Tide and Plain Bad Heroines both sit at 2/5, behind closed doors.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want a queer lead whose sexuality is simply part of her, you like witchy small-town settings with real secrets underneath, you read mysteries for momentum rather than for cleverness, and you are happy with a sweet, closed-door teen romance.
You may want to skip it if: flat or archetypal characters pull you out of a story, you pride yourself on spotting the villain early, you need a romance with real build-up and tension, or you want an adult-register book rather than something written squarely for teens.
In short: a strong concept and an honest look at a bad relationship, in a book that is lighter on character than its premise deserves.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
There is no live moment around this book right now, and I did not expect one — it is a 2019 debut whose duology finished in 2020. Reddit searches turned up no threads of note, and TikTok searches return only generic witch-book roundups rather than anything about this title specifically. What it has instead is staying power in the places YA actually circulates: roughly 39,000 Goodreads ratings and 6,400 written reviews, 1,839 Amazon ratings at 4.4, library ebook and audio editions still on OverDrive, and a Goodreads buddy-read thread for the series. The audiobook, from Listening Library, is narrated by Kristen DiMercurio and runs 9 hours 47 minutes; the Audible reviews I could see praise her for keeping the characters distinct and holding Hannah’s voice through the emotional scenes.
Prefer audio? Listen to These Witches Don’t Burn on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The representation, first and by a distance — the queer cast and the casualness of Hannah’s identity are the most-named draw in the reviews I read. The magic system is second, with readers enjoying the split between kinds of witches and the coven rules. Then the Salem setting, the sweetness of the new romance for those who liked it, and the twists: a real contingent describe the final act as suspenseful and surprising, and School Library Journal called the twists shocking. That is notable, because it is the exact opposite of one of the loudest complaints.
What readers argue about and complain about: Characters, above everything. Reviewer after reviewer describes the cast as flat or stock, and the side characters exist mostly to move the plot. The mystery is the second theme: a sizeable group of reviewers say they identified the villain well before Hannah did, which in a book that runs on suspense is a structural cost rather than a quibble. Third: the writing. Several reviewers find the dialogue immature and the prose plain, and Kirkus judged that “the book’s flame is disappointingly lackluster.” Beyond that, recurring notes on thin world-building, a Morgan romance with almost no build-up, Hannah returning to her ex as a topic so often that several readers got tired of it, and a Veronica storyline some felt the book let off too lightly. Pacing genuinely divides people — slow start for some, rushed finish for others — and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books landed on a C+ for a book it thought lost its emotional focus when the action took over. Forever Young Adult summed up the unconvinced half: “I just wasn’t feeling the magic.”
The series question everyone should ask first: it is finished, and book one is safe to stop after. These Witches Don’t Burn resolves its central mystery but closes on a hook that sets up a larger conflict. Book two, This Coven Won’t Break, came out in May 2020, sits higher at 3.84 across roughly 13,700 Goodreads ratings, and readers describe it as a satisfying conclusion to the duology. There is also a prequel novella, This Spell Can’t Last (3.74), and a short follow-up, These Charms Won’t Fade. If you liked book one even moderately, the numbers say the sequel is worth it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is These Witches Don’t Burn a romance?
Not primarily. It is a YA witch mystery with a romantic subplot, and several reviewers say the new relationship with Morgan gets very little build-up. Hannah’s history with her ex, Veronica, carries more emotional weight than the romance does.
How spicy is These Witches Don’t Burn?
A 1/5. It is a young adult novel, listed for ages 14 to 18 by Kirkus, and the romance goes no further than kissing. romance.io does not index it.
Does These Witches Don’t Burn end on a cliffhanger?
No hard cliffhanger. The central mystery is resolved, but the ending opens a larger conflict that the sequel picks up. You can stop after book one without being left hanging.
Is the These Witches Don’t Burn series finished?
Yes. It is a duology, and book two, This Coven Won’t Break, was published in May 2020 as the conclusion. It is rated slightly higher than book one on Goodreads, at 3.84.
Is there a These Witches Don’t Burn audiobook?
Yes. Listening Library published an unabridged edition narrated by Kristen DiMercurio, running 9 hours 47 minutes. Listener comments praise her character voices and her handling of Hannah’s first-person narration.
If You Loved These Witches Don’t Burn, Read These Next
If the witchcraft is the draw, The Honey Witch gives you a warmer, adult sapphic witch story with a stronger romance and more heat. If it was the magic-plus-murder engine, A Dark and Drowning Tide runs a folkloric whodunit with far richer prose and a real rivals-to-lovers arc. And for a queer-girls-and-a-curse mystery with a gothic edge, Plain Bad Heroines is longer, stranger and much more ambitious.
For more in this register, browse our lesbian mystery and thriller books guide or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
These Witches Don’t Burn is a book with a better premise than execution. Secret witches in tourist-trap Salem is a great hook, Hannah’s queerness is refreshingly unremarkable, and the toxic-ex storyline with Veronica is sharper and more honest than most YA manages. It is also populated by thin characters, built around a mystery a lot of readers solved early, and light on the romance its cover copy implies. But for a teen reader, or an adult who wants a fast, closed-door, queer witch mystery, it is an easy afternoon and the gateway to a complete duology whose second half rates higher. Check These Witches Don’t Burn on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, These Witches Don’t Burn ranks as a solid-concept YA sapphic witch mystery — easy, queer-normal and quick, held back by flat characters and a guessable villain, and best approached for the Salem premise and the toxic-ex thread rather than the romance or the whodunit.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ 3.70 average across 39,000 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ 4.4 across 1,839 Amazon ratings
- ✓ Representation is the near-universal strength
- ✓ Flat characters the most repeated complaint
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ Sweet, low-drama first love
- ✓ Readers who like it call it cute
- ✓ Toxic-ex dynamic has real charge
- ✓ Morgan romance gets almost no build-up
Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Hannah out and unapologetic from page one
- ✓ Veronica is the most vivid creation
- ✓ Queer cast drawn realistically, per Kirkus
- ✓ Flat cast is the loudest complaint
Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Brisk, readable first-person voice
- ✓ SLJ praised the dynamic writing
- ✓ Salem atmosphere lands for many readers
- ✓ Kirkus faults telling over showing
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Emotional abuse depicted clear-eyed
- ✓ Hannah’s hurt over Veronica rings true
- ✓ Coven secrecy gives the stakes weight
- ✓ Late action pivot thins the feeling
Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5
- ✓ Young adult, ages 14 to 18
- ✓ Kissing only, per reader reports
- ✓ Not indexed on romance.io
- ✓ Relationship abuse is the real content flag
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Central mystery resolves in book one
- ✓ Twists land for a real contingent
- ✓ Sequel hook, not a hard cliffhanger
- ✓ Many readers guessed the villain early
Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Duology complete, sequel rated 3.84
- ✓ Audiobook under ten hours
- ✓ Salem setting suits an autumn reread
- ✓ Mystery loses its pull once solved
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