Reviews with content warning for Confinement - Wyrd Sisters

Content warnings that's not a covered tag, yummy and not so yummy food is mentioned frequently
And despite me having tagged a bunch of triggers (for honesty), its more of a case in like a kids tv show like yes technically these dark things are there but few are is triggered by or even notice it due to the general theme and lack of seriousness.
Kinda like cartoon logic, sure theyre doing life threatening things but they're immortal so it doesn't have the same stakes kind of vibe a la roger rabbit, rather than recent gritty dc movies or a horror movie lol
The only really triggering and unnecessary part for me as a survivor of a bunch of bs, is the body shaming of the women

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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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.

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booksthatburn's review

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

WYRD SISTERS became enjoyable about halfway through, which was either when the Shakespeare references really got going or is just when I realized they were happening at all. I got enough of them for it to be funny, but it also means that a lot of the humor is referential, depending on the reader to be familiar with a bunch of other stuff (or in this case, with several specific plays) in order to get the jokes. Discworld humor tends to he referential but this felt like a particularly egregious version since so much of it has one source rather than generally pulling from many disparate inspirations.

There was a disconcerting amount of humor which revolved around men being in dresses in a theatrical setting. It was particularly frustrating when someone of it was from a Dwarf, who (at least later on in the series) have an approach to gender which I’ve been promised I’ll like, but clearly had some issues to work out in this one. The “joke” began and ended with “that man is in a dress”, which is 1) not actually a joke and 2) potentially transphobic.

The Fool is my favorite character, his backstory is very moving and his romance is genuinely sweet. Overall this one is fine but not amazing.

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