Reviews

I’ve read a couple dozen-ish Discworld books- nowhere close to all of them but enough that I can say I’m a fan. My usual experience with a Pratchett book is that I am glued to it for the first half or so— while he is establishing another loony, brilliant premise— but the endings rarely live up to the promise of the beginning. Things kind of just stumble on until the end.

This one was the opposite. For the past three years, I’ve decided I would read Hogfather during the Christmas season, because what could be more perfect? One of my favorite authors has a Christmas novel! But it takes so dang long for the story to get going in this one that I’ve never made it past the first 30 or so pages.

This year I was determined to plow through no matter what, so I kept plugging away at it, and finally about halfway through things started coming together. From there to the end I was thoroughly absorbed, and I loved it.

The premise is that the Hogfather (a Discworld-skewed version of Santa Claus) has disappeared. Death (who is a recurring character in many Discworld novels) has taken over the job of delivering toys and gifts to the world’s children (plus maybe a few extras). Death’s granddaughter Susan, who is just trying to live like a normal human, gets sucked in to solving the mystery of the Hogfather’s disappearance. Meanwhile the academics at the Unseen University are up to their usual inexplicable antics. It’s all good fun until — as is often the case in Discworld— some surprisingly deep insights about the nature of human belief become clear.

If you can slog through the first bit, I ended up loving this. But it took awhile.

soniac's review against another edition

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4.0

Discworld is a reliably good time. This is my first Death-focused book, but it wasn’t hard to pick up the new characters. Mister Teatime is a surprisingly frightening villain, which is not something I expected from this series, but was very impressed by. The story was as fun as the premise promised, and it had my favorite part of Discworld, which is the relationship between people and the gods. The only thing keeping it from five stars was that there were a few too many storylines and it felt a little too erratic jumping from scene to scene.

baccou's review against another edition

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adventurous funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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