Archive for the ‘Andrzej Sapkowski’ Category
Confession! I did not read any Witcher books until after I watched the Netflix show, and the major reason I got into the TV show was, um, Henry Cavill is super hot. Yes, I am super shallow, and my response to my shallowness becoming public knowledge is: IDGAF.
The video games and the first two books has been floating around the house for a while, my husband would play the game and my commentary was 100% about Geralt’s hairstyle.
So we watch the Netflix show, and I become obsessed with it. If this has happened to you as well, I highly recommend @incwitcher on twitter, for the kindest most welcoming fandom on the interwebs.
We had the first two Witcher books on our bookshelves, and I decided to give them a try.
Spoilers:
Were they different from the TV show? Yes, very much so.
Were they good? Oh my sweet summer child, these two books are the most fun I’ve had in ages! Snark, dry humor, adventure, good conversations, people who think they can escape the consequences of their terrible decisions (surprise! You can’t!), all my favorite things! Apparently I really, really love world building through dialog? Who knew. Reading them made me want to watch the TV show again, so I did.
Why have I only read the first two books, why haven’t I continued on in the series? Simply put, binge reading a series is totally not my thing. Also, we haven’t picked up the others yet.
The first book, The Last Wish, is all episodic short stories, many of which have a “monster of the week” feel to them. There is a framing device which worked well for me, but other readers have been turned off by it. I am wondering if these short stories originally appeared in magazines or other anthologies, and they were “fixed up” into a novel by way of a framing device. There’s no table of contents or anything, this isn’t presented as a collection – it is designed to be read as a novel.
The gist of a lot of the stories is that yes, yes, we know Geralt’s job is to literally kill monsters. But who is actually the monster here? I recently read the original Frankenstein, so my brain was thrilled to get more of these kinds of conversations! I’m a sucker for the “monster” who is a person who was broken by their own community, sometimes their own family.
It certainly helped that the first couple short stories involve mythology and fairy tale retellings, which I am also a sucker for.
Someone on twitter, I wish I could remember who, said something about how whatever they were reading wasn’t grimdark, it was grimm – dark, grimm as in, in these fairy tales the kids die at the end, the witch wins, there isn’t a happy ending, it is dirty and dangerous and dark AF. That describes The Last Wish pretty well, and I just really liked that description of liking dark fiction, but fiction that isn’t “grimdark”.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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