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bluejayreads's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Reading the early Discworld books after having read almost exclusively later books is a wild experience. I’m curious to find the point in the series where it changes from Discworld-crossing fate-of-the-world adventures to geographically-limited profound human stories.
This book came very close to being the first Discworld book that I didn’t finish, and its saving grace was that it’s so short. By the time I got well and truly fed up I only had an hour and a half left and I figured at that point I might as well finish the thing.
Mort follows Mort, a farmer’s son who gets apprenticed to Death and completely screws up everything because he saw a pretty face. That is literally his motivation. He glimpsed a pretty girl while in the middle of doing something else and proceeds to fall so head over heels for this girl who is pretty and whom he has never spoken to that his actions start unraveling the very fabric of reality. And he does his gosh darned best to avoid putting it right despite one method of putting it right requiring him to do absolutely nothing and let a thing happen. This is not technically an idiot plot because Mort is the only real idiot here, but I suppose Death is partially at fault too for giving his apprentice a ton of responsibility and then not bothering to check on him.
Death himself is a pretty neat character to follow around, and I think I would have preferred the book to be about him. Mort isn’t awful as a character, except for the idiot part, but a couple of jarring fast-forwards through time make his growing-up process feel weirdly abrupt (and yet he doesn’t grow out of being an idiot). Death’s adopted daughter is rude, bratty, and obnoxious, and yet like Malicia in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, she is justified and rewarded for it in the end. I hate it and I hate her, but luckily from the ending I don’t think she’ll be showing up again.
The Discworld is cool. Death is awesome. Mort is an idiot, Death’s daughter is obnoxious, and the entire plot could have been avoided if Mort was less of an idiot for a pretty face or if Death actually checked his apprentice’s work. There’s a lot of great ideas here, and I hope they get to be in a better story in the next book featuring Death.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Murder
Moderate: Animal death and Child death
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Body horror, Suicidal thoughts, and Alcohol
Adult/minor relationship details:booksthatburn's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Most of this was fun and I had a good time, but there were too many random moments that took me out of the narrative with an off-putting comment that didn’t fit the rest of the story. Usually this took the place of treating the mention of someone’s fatness or the idea that they might be insane as if the observation of it was the whole joke. These moments were especially frustrating because so much of the rest of the humor is great. It’s paced well, the dynamic between DEATH and Mort was strange but interesting, and I liked the ending.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Animal death, Death, Fatphobia, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Murder, and Alcohol
Minor: Toxic relationship