Reviews with content warning for Racism - MacBest

I had a fun time reading this book! I had, as a whole, enjoyed the Rincewind focused books more as Ive been working through the Discworld books, but this one tickles me just as much, if not more. The elements Macbeth and Hamlet that are put in here really add to the enjoyment for me as well!

Content Warnings

bluejayreads's review against another edition

Go to review page

slow-paced

2.0

I want to preface this by saying that I think Sir Terry Pratchett is an excellent writer and on a whole the Discworld series is really good. And I’m starting with that disclaimer because for a large part of the middle of this story, I legitimately hated it.

My experience with Granny Weatherwax thus far has been in Equal Rites and the Tiffany Aching books, in which she was a hands-off, no-nonsense, highly respected and highly competent old witch, less a character than a force of nature that deigned to take human form temporarily. In this book she is a character – she has flaws and makes mistakes and encounters things she doesn’t understand and gets bested sometimes. And seeing a side of Granny Weatherwax that could be wrong and not understand and lose was just so alien to my understanding of her that my brain was going, “Nope! This is Wrong!” the whole book.

The other two witches in the book are Nanny Ogg (who was her usual self but seemed to be mostly there to round out the trio of witches and not to do anything in particular) and a young one whose name I can’t for the life of me remember. (Update: it’s Magret, pronounced like “regret” but with an M.) Her main purpose seemed to be to get the two older witches to explain things to the reader, complain about how the older witches are doing magic all wrong because they don’t go in for occult jewelry and moon phases and stuff, and be part of the most awkward and chemistry-less romance side plot I’ve ever read. And judging by the amount of times it’s mentioned, her most important aspect is how very tiny her boobs are.

The basic plot is the old king got knifed by his cousin the Duke, as one does, and so the Duke becomes king. The king’s toddler son ends up with our three witches, who give him to a troupe of actors to raise. The Duke is such a bad ruler that is disrupts the magical stuff in the area, so the witches decide they have to do some meddling to replace him with the old king’s son.

Which leads to another major issue I had with the book. The Duke’s abusive wife is clearly the true villain here. The Duke keeps growing more unhinged throughout the story, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s from a combination of years of severe verbal and psychological abuse from his wife, guilt over murdering his cousin (which his wife forced him to do), and legitimate mental illness that is literally pointed out on-page by other characters. And yet the book still keeps trying to paint him as the Big Bad Evil Enemy King. He doesn’t need to be violently overthrown, he needs a safe place, a divorce, a restraining order, a mood stabilizer, and a really good therapist.

This one was significantly longer than books 1-5 (11 hours in audiobook compared to 7-8 for the previous books) and it really shouldn’t have been. Considering the entire plot was “turns out the Duke is a bad king so let’s get the previous king’s son back and crown him instead,” it had no business being more than 7 hours tops. The middle dragged badly, and compounded with all the other issues I’ve mentioned, I started to hate this book.

I stuck it out mainly because I really want to read all the Discworld books and I wasn’t sure I could say I had if I DNF’d this one. And it wasn’t entirely horrible. The climax was fairly good, and there were some good one-liners and a few moments that legitimately made me laugh. But on a whole … this is most definitely not one of Sir Terry’s best.

Content Warnings

More...