Reader Reviews
Overall Rating: Not Rated Yet
|
Upload Your Own Review For Terry Prachett's I Shall Wear Midnight Share This Review: |
Product details
 Paperback: 400 pagesPublisher: Doubleday Children’s Books; 1st Edition edition (2 Sep 2010) ISBN-10: 0385611072 ISBN-13: 978-0385611077 |
Product Description
A man with no eyes. No eyes at all. Two tunnels in his head …It’s not easy being a witch, and it’s certainly not all whizzing about on broomsticks, but Tiffany Aching – teen witch – is doing her best. Until something evil wakes up, something that stirs up all the old stories about nasty old witches, so that just wearing a pointy hat suddenly seems a very bad idea. Worse still, this evil ghost from the past is hunting down one witch in particular. He’s hunting for Tiffany. Andhe’s found her…A fabulous Discworld title filled with witches and magic and told in the inimitable Terry Pratchett style, “I Shall Wear Midnight” is the fourth Discworld title to feature Tiffany and her tiny, fightin’, boozin’ pictsie friends, the Nac Mac Feegle (aka The Wee Free Men).
More
Visit the Terry Prachett Book Reviews page to find more reviews of their books and learn more about the author
Witches have had a bad press down the years. Cackling, evil figures who capriciously turn people into amphibians just because they can, dunking and/or burning is too good for them. Yet the witch is also a figure who represents power wielded with wisdom, the wise woman with a healer’s eye for the fragility of life.
The tension between these two folk figures has been at the centre of Terry Pratchett’s depictions of witches in the Discworld almost from the start. Pratchett has never before explored what happens when ordinary people turn against witches, when a hysterical Salem moment is in the offing, when mob misrule takes over and every witch is an evil cackler rather than a wise-woman. How and why might this happen? To answer these questions, Pratchett turns once again to Tiffany Aching, the witch of the Chalk. Tiffany is an older-than-her-years teenager with, if not quite the weight of the world on her shoulders, at least the weight of the villages she serves. She’s a working witch, which is, in the Discworld, is akin to being a district nurse/social worker, but with serious attitude.
But trouble is coming. An evil figure has awakened, a spiteful, jealous creature that preys on people’s minds and turns them against witches: the Cunning Man. He, or more accurately it, is a figure that Tiffany will have to face down alone. Oh, other witches might offer advice before the final showdown, but there are some battles a witch needs to fight by herself if she’s truly to command respect. But if this sounds rather solemn, then rest assured that around this central narrative, Pratchett’s trademark humour is as much in evidence as ever, (a selfish nurse tells Tiffany that she’s “never been so insulted before” in her life: “Really?” said Tiffany. “I’m genuinely surprised.”) In addition, the Nac Mac Feegles are on hand to provide slapstick moments involving fighting and drinking as well as an elder witch called “Nanny” Ogg who doesn’t have a problem with drinking a little too much then singing the night away.
But that doesn’t mean the book lacks depth and similarities to reality. The Chalk setting vividly brings to mind the southern England landscape where the writer has made his home. Most of all there’s the sense that Pratchett understands village life down to the core of his being – its rhythms, its joys and its considerable frustrations too.
Pratchett has one of the keenest minds and greatest storytelling abilities I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, so it doesn’t surprise me that this is a great book that will no doubt be read over and over for quite a while.