{"id":461,"date":"2006-10-26T21:05:32","date_gmt":"2006-10-26T21:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=461"},"modified":"2024-02-23T21:18:21","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T02:18:21","slug":"pratchett_wintersmith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/10\/pratchett_wintersmith\/","title":{"rendered":"Pratchett, Terry: (35) <cite>Wintersmith<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Terry Pratchett&#8217;s latest Discworld book, <cite>Wintersmith<\/cite><\/strong>, is the third Tiffany Aching book and something I&#8217;ve been slavering after since 2004, when I heard him read from it at Noreascon. He ended his reading an evil cliffhanger; I think he&#8217;d intended to read another section, but decided against it when the audience burst into applause at the aforementioned cliffhanger.<\/p>\n<p>Probably very few books could live up to two years of eager anticipation. <cite>Wintersmith<\/cite> is a very enjoyable book. But I find odd a few things about its structure; not necessarily bad, just odd.<\/p>\n<p>Tiffany Aching joins a dance that&#8217;s not meant for her and inadvertently fascinates the Wintersmith, who wasn&#8217;t exactly the <em>personification<\/em> of winter until this interesting human catches his attention&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not easy, when a season has a crush on you.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, the structural oddities, in no particular order.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom: 1em\">The book is in something of two parts, the Wintersmith plot and the further education of the young witches Tiffany got to know in the prior book. In a general sense, they relate, in that Tiffany becoming a better witch helps her deal with the Wintersmith; but the connection is much less prominent than the witching stuff was to the hiver plot of the last book, and the resolution of the Wintersmith plot seems a bit simple. Fitting, but not quite the thing to wait a whole book on. I really like the witching stuff, mind, but it doesn&#8217;t quite seem to cohere with the rest.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom: 1em\">The evil cliffhanger is from quite late in the story chronologically, but is chapter one of the book. I&#8217;m not quite sure what it&#8217;s doing there. There&#8217;s nothing actually <em>wrong<\/em> with it being there, but it&#8217;s a bit odd. What I actively, though mildly, dislike, is the narrative comment after the evil cliffhanger, which sets up an unfulfilled expectation.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom: 1em\">There&#8217;s a subplot with Roland, who Tiffany rescued from Fairie in the first book. I like this subplot very much (possibly my favorite line in the book is the comment Rob Anyway makes about sandwiches), but it comes in late and feels a little unbalanced thereby.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I like the book, I do. It just puzzles me.<\/p>\n<p>Pratchett has said in the past that there may be a total of four Tiffany Aching books. There feels like there&#8217;s more story to be told about Tiffany to me (in the same way that there felt like there wasn&#8217;t more story to be told about Granny Weatherwax after <cite>Carpe Jugulum<\/cite>, and since then she&#8217;s appeared only as a supporting character). I have no knowledge about Pratchett&#8217;s present intentions, but I hope there&#8217;s another; there are some interesting possibilities opened up by this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Terry Pratchett&#8217;s latest Discworld book, Wintersmith, is the third Tiffany Aching book and something I&#8217;ve been slavering after since 2004, when I heard him read from it at Noreascon. He ended his reading an evil cliffhanger; I think he&#8217;d intended to read another section, but decided against it when the audience burst into applause at &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/10\/pratchett_wintersmith\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Pratchett, Terry: (35) <cite>Wintersmith<\/cite>&#8220;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,64,15],"tags":[350],"class_list":["post-461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-discworld","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-pratchett-terry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2863,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions\/2863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}