Author: Terry Pratchett
Published: 2009
Rating: B-
"Football in the Discworld."
I love Discworld. I love Pratchett. Unfortunately, I was not impressed with this latest offering. At first I thought it was the wizards, but I quite liked The Color of Magic and have never had an issue with them on such a large scale. Instead, I think it was the entire novel. The characters are still there, and I still enjoyed getting to see how everything was going in my favorite bookverse, but so much just seemed...wrong. The characterizations seemed off, the plot wasn't what I had really expected, and I didn't have that "what line is he gonna get me with next?" feeling at all. And while I enjoyed seeing that Vetinari can be human (getting drunk, in fact, is very human), he seemed to be more benevolent than dictator here, and lost much of his sharp, biting wit.
It's almost melancholy. I don't know if Pratchett's health issues are behind the problems (I heard him in one interview say he was actually having to go back and look at notes on his characters every day, which was upsetting for him), or if he's just about to end the series and that is why everything seemed so sad, but the novel wasn't what I hoped it to be. It's been a major blow to me, as a long-time Discworld fan, because I was really liking the Lipwig books and was hoping that the teaser to a third would materialize into a new book, but now I'm wary.
But it still gets a B, of course, because it IS Discworld. Every once in a while the veil would lift and a glimpse of the characters would shine through, and I generally enjoyed the football game itself, as well as some real interaction with Lady Margolotta (who we've heard about but rarely seen). But I'm not sure if I would recommend it to anyone, old Discworld fan or new, as I think it is one of the worst books in the series, if not the worst.