A review by chirson
Miecz przeznaczenia by Andrzej Sapkowski

3.0

Re-reading continues. The second volume of short stories has some real gems (Geralt meeting Ciri again and again - Ciri herself isn't that great there, but the people around these meetings, the dryads and the trader who asks Geralt to protect his goods and then takes care of him) but it's also significantly worse when it comes to gratuitous sexual content. Jaskier is an annoying lech (it's implied he has sex with at least one underage girl, Yennefer's single-minded pursuit of fertility renders her a two-dimensional stand-in for a character. The romance between Geralt and Yennefer is one of the weakest parts of this - the bones are good, particularly if we ignore the beginning (the author seems to) but then the realisation is not great at all. Yennefer in general doesn't seem to have a consistent characterisation, she's a cool girl and not a female character whose motivation I can buy.

But I did enjoy the story about the dopplers taking over town, and the Broceliad forest, and the ending. And now I am quite curious how the actual saga will stand up to my memories.