The Poisons We Drink: A Review

The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste

My Rating: 5 stars

Cover Rating: 10/10 this is such a powerful cover. It fits the strength that Venus has as the love Witcher. It’s stunning.

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Publish Date: April 30th, 2024

Number of Pages: 480

Received: NetGalley provided an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Purchase: Barnes & Noble

Synopsis:

In a country divided between humans and witchers, Venus Stoneheart hustles as a brewer making illegal love potions to support her family.

Love potions is a dangerous business. Brewing has painful, debilitating side effects, and getting caught means death or a prison sentence. But what Venus is most afraid of is the dark, sentient magic within her.

Then an enemy’s iron bullet kills her mother, Venus’s life implodes. Keeping her reckless little sister Janus safe is now her responsibility. When the powerful Grand Witcher, the ruthless head of her coven, offers Venus the chance to punish her mother’s killer, she has to pay a steep price for revenge. The cost? Brew poisonous potions to enslave D.C.’s most influential politicians.

As Venus crawls deeper into the corrupt underbelly of her city, the line between magic and power blurs, and it’s hard to tell who to trust…Herself included.

Opening Sentence: “An internal gift exists within all breathing things to recognize where one stands in the food chain.”

Musings:

The Poisons We Drink is an intense novel where pain is one with magic. Magic itself takes on many different paths, but as a Witcher you are only sworn to one of those paths and if you should break it there are physically painful consequences.

Reading this book it brought me to think about the idea of what it takes to make a change in the world. While the events and actions Venus takes may at times feel extreme, the history of protests, and the actions people take to make real change in their communities is a painful and extreme endeavor. Often times people are not noticed when being passive and in this novel Venus and her loved ones go to drastic measures to ensure the safety and future of their community.

Sometimes, in order to create the change you wish to see in the world you must become a monster in someone else’s eyes. Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t easy and sometimes it isn’t nice, but some things do just need to be done. In a better world things would just be right, but in this world and in the world of this novel immoral acts must be done to fight for the rights people deserve.

As the love Witcher when Venus brews love potions it is an act that causes her great physical pain everytime she performs one especially depending on how powerful that potion needs to be. It causes her broken bones, the loss of teeth, internal bleeding, and more. She then has to take a healing potion and feel the pain of being remade and she does this everytime she brews love potions. Majority of the time none of her love potions are for romantic reasons. Their for a love of an idea, familial love, repairing a friendship, or to love something else more to give up an addiction. The breath of what can be done under just her wheelhouse is incredible. The details of the different paths witchers can take fascinated me.

A huge amount of sacrifice for the sake of something greater is a huge theme of this book and I find it beautiful. Venus actively pushes people away because she knows she makes some of the most difficult decisions in life and she hurts the people she loves taking those actions. Yet those who truly love and understand her stick around. I especially loved the friends to lovers situationship she gets with Presley. They’re a non-binary cutie who also makes some hard choices themselves.

There lives so much depth in this novel. The magic systems and the political system is so well thought out. It’s an incredible read. I 100% recommend this book!

THANK YOU ALL FOR READING! 

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