Jinissa is a citizen of the nation of Calavria, exiled for political reasons and living in the neighboring kingdom of Lendiil. Like all Calavrians, she has paranormal powers. When she displays these in order to save a child’s life, she is immediately seized by the Lendiili and condemned as a witch and a spy. Moments before she suffers her punishment, a good-looking nobleman rides up and rescues her – temporarily. The man is Lord Stephan, who was sent by the king. Apparently the king wants to interrogate the Calavrian before she is flogged and executed.

Like the villagers, Lord Stephan bitterly hates all Calavrians. He takes Jinny on a long journey over a snowy, wolf-infested mountain range to the king’s capital. On this trip, Jinny learns about the painful past that has made Stephan into the hard man he is today, and Stephan learns that not all magic is evil.

This book never swerves from its devotion to the oldest and safest romance traditions. Readers will not be surprised when Jinny and Stephan get caught in a snowstorm and must take shelter together in a lonely cabin. Nor will it come as a shock when Jinny gets chilled by the snow, and Stephan warms her up by getting naked with her. Stephan, a man who blames Jinny for something that someone else did to him ten years earlier, is the living embodiment of a romance novel cliché, and while Jinny is pleasant she never rises above place-holder status and becomes a real character in her own right.

The world-building in Witch’s Journey is extremely shallow. For instance, there’s apparently only one road from Jinny’s town to the kingdom’s capital, and is a road so arduous that only Jinny and Stephan are traveling it; there are no inns or towns along the way. One wonders how the king collects taxes from that part of his realm. A bigger problem: it takes Jinny and Stephan between seven and ten days to get to the capital. How did the news about Jinny’s conviction travel to the king in time for him to summon Stephan and send him out there, all in the two days it took for her to be condemned?

There’s a lot of potential here. McCullough has created a fantasy world that has several interesting things going for it. She briefly touches upon the reason for the Lendiili’s hatred of magic and the troubles between Lendiil and Calavria. The magic itself seems to be based on the elements of fire, air, earth, and water, which (while hardly new) could have been interesting. Unfortunately, most of these things are ignored throughout the book. We don’t learn much about magic because Jinny spends almost the entire book with a sigil (a charm of sorts) around her neck which prevents her from using her powers. We don’t learn much about the way the kingdom of Lendiil works because we spend the entire time in the woods with Jinny and Stephan.

On the other end of the scale, the book is competently written and engaging. I have certainly read far worse books. There’s nothing horribly wrong with it, or even very annoying. It’s just that it is so very safe. To me, the fusion of romance and fantasy presents an opportunity for writers to do something really new and interesting: to create a new world, to explore the impact of magic on people’s relationships, to breathe new life into the genre. Witch’s Journey is about a magical woman who lives in an imaginary land, but McCullough ignores the potential of that setup and makes no attempt to do anything new or different with a standard formula.

Those who enjoy road romances might well enjoy Witch’s Journey. I was entertained by the book, but in the end I was also rather disappointed.