Wintersmith
Terry Pratchett
Tiffany's education continues
Wintersmith, novel 35 in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and number 3 in the Tiffany Aching subseries, has two plots. This is a common thing in fiction series, which often have an overarching plot for the series as well as a plot for each individual book. The Discworld series as a whole has no overall plot that I can discern. The Tiffany Aching subseries does. It is a Bildungsroman, at least through this, its third novel.
The plot of the individual novel Wintersmith is the one that gives it its title. The Wintersmith is one of those anthropomorphic personifications that play so large a role in the Discworld. He is the personification of winter. Tiffany unwisely brings herself to his attention. The consequences and Tiffany's striving to get him back to what he ought to be supply most of the events of the story.
I enjoyed this a lot, mainly because I really like Tiffany. Tiffany is, in some ways, a familiar sort of hero. She's the smart, hard-working type who gets stuff done with little fanfare. She is still but a girl of thirteen. (The Feegles call her the Big Wee Hag: Hag means witch, Big means human, and Wee is a reference to her being still a girl.) She is up in the Ramtops apprenticing to witches there, specifically to Miss Treason, a prickly and scary witch who drives most apprentices away in mere days. It is part of Tiffany's understated competence that she manages to succeed with and learn from Miss Treason.
Tiffany associates with a coven of other young witches. She may be the youngest of them, but she is now, by the third novel, quietly recognized as being perhaps the most powerful of them. When Miss Treason announces her imminent death (witches have foreknowledge of their deaths, so this is not a big shock to anyone), the senior witches argue about who should take over her cottage, which means, in essence, take over her witchcraft practice. It falls to one of the older witchlings of the coven, Annagramma. And it falls to Tiffany to make Annagramma a success. This was, for me, the most interesting story of Wintersmith.
Tiffany novels are always more fun because, wherever you find Tiffany, you also find the Nac Mac Feegle, the pictsies who guard and serve her with more enthusiasm than sense. (In this regard and no other Tiffany reminds me of Rincewind -- wherever you find Rincewind, the Luggage will not be far away, and the Luggage is always fun. Good comic relief sidekicks are not to be despised, and Rincewind and Tiffany have the best!)
So this was good. The plot with the Wintersmith was not bad, but the most interesting story is Tiffany's progress towards becoming a full-fledged and, one foresees, uniquely skilled and powerful witch. Tiffany's story continues in I Shall Wear Midnight, a title that was foreshadowed in A Hatful of Sky. I look forward to it.