Reviews with content warning for Child death - Feet of Clay

The City Watch subseries seems to have only one plot: Preventing people from doing a monarchy. Someone wants Ankh-Morpork to have a king again and start scheming to make it happen, and the Watch has to step in and stop it from happening.

In the first City Watch book, Guards! Guards!, they crowned a dragon king. In the second book, Men at Arms, there was a scheme to replace the patrician with a king (although that scheme did generally fade into the background of the book as a whole). And this one is a murder mystery and, again, another plot to crown a king.

When I first started reading the City Watch subseries, I thought Carrot was going to be the protagonist, or perhaps a deuteragonist with Commander Vimes. But Carrot really took a back seat in this one. He was there and useful, but not a major player. The characters with the most page time in this one were Vimes (expected) and Angua (less expected). Vimes was just Vimes, now with a small taste of married life, but Angua got a lot of development – not growth exactly, but learning more about her inner thoughts and what makes her tick.

She was also the driving force for a couple of the themes this book had going on. One of the bigger ones was workplace sexism, both benevolent and less so. A more minor one, and one that’s run as an undercurrent through the other City Guard books as well, is racism/prejudice against undead people. And there were some non-Angua-related themes as well. There was the question of what people really want from government, which came up a few times. And the more major theme of who gets to be a person was explored through the murder mystery, since that plot involves a lot of golems.

I’m not normally much for murder mysteries, but this one didn’t feel like a traditional murder mystery. Perhaps it’s because there’s so much else going on, perhaps it’s because it quickly ends up being more focused on finding the suspect than determining the whodunnit. But regardless, it was a solid story. The side characters were great, Ankh-Morpork is such a fun setting, and the whole book is entertaining and often funny. It’s a good story all around, and maybe my favorite City Watch book so far.

Content Warnings

numerous_bees's review against another edition

Go to review page

funny hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

Pratchett had hit his stride by this stage of the series, handling the deep philosophical ideas which drive the Discworld stories so casually he makes it look incidental. The core of the Vimes/City Watch stories is class-based injustice, this time contained within a murder mystery story featuring dubious heraldry jokes (Arthur Carry, candlemaker, bought himself the family motto "Art brought forth the Candle", while Rudolph Potts the baker got "Because I knead the Dough") and wry observation ("fire escapes were unknown in Ankh-Morpork and the flames generally had to leave via the roof").

Despite starting to show its age and being a little creaky around the subplots, Feet of Clay remains one of my favourite Discworld books. Highly recommended.

Content Warnings

inka_z's review against another edition

Go to review page

funny hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

lethalballet's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous funny hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

More...