Reviews with content warning for Death - Pani Jeziora

Wow. What a finale to the Witcher series. This took a long time for me to read, mostly because the start of the book is very, very slow. I can’t really remember the significance of Geralt’s arc in Toussaint necessarily or the start of Ciri’s travels post-Tower and at the end of the day it didn’t really end up mattering that much.

I do need to say though that as a Merlin fan I really enjoyed all the Camelot references, lol.

In the middle of the book is where the plot starts to pick up and Sapkowski’s writing shines once more. There’s a chapter that uses multiple POVs to describe a battle scene and it’s masterful. Throughout, we get thrown between times and places with only scraps of information to tell us where we are but it is perfectly executed. The use of a recurring motif (I won’t spoil what it is) hit me like a tonne of bricks when I worked out what it was doing. The use of sometimes very simple dialogue or clever word games is brilliant and even more brilliant when you consider that it survived translation, so well done to French as well for his work there.

This is by far the darkest and saddest book in the series, I feel, and I think that’s what makes it beautiful in its own way. I spent the whole book wondering how it would align with the characters I know from TW3, and I only got that answer right at the end, which was excellent. I had been lightly spoiled for the ending previously which is a shame but I still deeply enjoyed the book.

I’m going to wait a good long while, until I’m feeling nostalgic, to read Season of Storms.

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Like all the other books in the Witcher series, this one jumps back and forth between perspectives, and gives a lot of information that isn’t completely necessary or interesting. The writing style is descriptive but not necessarily excessively so. The story itself has a lot of twists and turns and mysteries. I’d say the ending was rather bittersweet. Also, there were a lot of things that didn’t really make too much sense for the characters that have developed over the past handful of books. There were also just a handful of times whenever an action was starting to peak, and then it just dropped down because there was some kind of intervention that just happened to happen at that moment.

I didn’t necessarily expect a happy ending for everyone… But at least an ending that actually had conclusions that really mattered or that made sense would’ve been nice.

Overall, I rather enjoyed the series, despite its many flaws. With the switching perspectives, it did get confusing as to what was going on and what character was doing what. It often went to characters that I wasn’t really sure why they were even included… Unless they were just trying to close up plot lines? I don’t know; they didn’t really matter. It didn’t really seem very important that So-and-So died in such a way or succeeded in XYZ. Sure, sometimes it was nice to see what older characters that we hadn’t seen in a while were doing… But overall it wasn’t really important to the plot what was going on in their lives.

The reader for this audiobook is very talented! He really knows how to manipulate his voice to the different characters and stick with it consistently. The voice acting was also very good with emphasized emotions relevant to the scenes.

I’m really interested in seeing how the series on Netflix adapts all of the storylines. Hopefully it’s a little bit less convoluted…

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