Reviews - Guards! Guards! | The StoryGraph

5.29k reviews for:

Guards! Guards!

Terry Pratchett

4.25 AVERAGE

roryalan's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous funny lighthearted medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

thought this was a fun book. It has lots of absurdist, British humor that reminds me of monty python. The plot itself isn't super deep or anything, it mostly seems to serve as a base for the jokes. All in all, a pleasant and fairly funny book.

Book Summary: 
A young guy named Carrot who was raised by dwarfs is sent off to learn about being a human. Specifically, he is to become a guard in Ankh Morpork (I believe is the name). He's excited because he thinks it's an honorable job, but when he gets there he realizes joining the guard there is thought of as a punishment. The guards don't really enforce laws anymore, the city has accepted a certain amount of crime as normal. The existing guards seem like things aren't going very well for them personally either. Carrot, however, is very literal and excited. He reads the entire book of laws and sets off to arrest people in violation of those laws, despite the protests of basically everyone else.

Meanwhile, a secret group is meeting to discuss how they can stop being oppressed. They plan to do so by summoning dragons using a book on summoning dragons stolen from a magical library (the librarian of which is an orangutan of roughly human intelligence). As you might guess, people around the city start being incinerated by dragon(s). The guard sets out to solve the mystery of the dragon, and return their city to normal.

Along the way, they meet some new people and slowly become happier, better, and more willing to uphold the law as it used to be.

Dependence: 
This is the first book in the guards arc of discworld, so you don't need to read any other books. That said, reading more books from discworld will give you some more background into the city, the magic, the character Death, etc.

Characters: 
The characters are mostly there for the jokes it seems. Somewhat cartoonish, though a few of them do have legitimate character arcs.

Plot: 
The plot is decent enough to drive the absurdist humor that is the focus of the book, and the world is incorporated into the plan in interesting ways.

Magic System: 
This book mostly uses a typical European, medieval fantasy magic system. There are dragons, animals that can talk, summoning spells, etc. It's not very unique, but it's not meant to be.

World: 
The world is a disc on the back of a giant turtle floating through space, but the world we see the characters in is a pretty standard medieval fantasy world. It has a few unique elements in this book, but the world becomes more interesting the more discworld books you've read.

Pacing: 
The pacing of the book is fairly normal. It's not that long of a book, but it gives us time to get to know each of the characters and their motivations.

Writing: 
The writing is quippy and clever, lots of plays on words and some pop-culture references. Not being British, some of the jokes went over my head. For example, at one point carrot says something like "Speaking of kings, does anyone want any chips?" and I still have no idea what this means. The beginning of the books comes across like a monty python skit, lots of misunderstandings to drive humor and whatnot.

haaksae's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous funny mysterious tense 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

tfields's review against another edition

3.75

adventurous funny lighthearted medium-paced

Loveable characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

marycel's review against another edition

5.0

Terry Pratchett is a balm for my soul. Not only is he really, really funny, but he also knows when to gently transition the humor into something serious to make a solid point about real life. In a way, it's painful to see how easily adaptable this story is to the present day, being that it's about how humans will act against their own best interests and put someone terrible in charge, but it's incredible to see the parallels from this book written in 1989.

I lost my brother's copy of Guards! Guards! when I was in high school, and I hadn't finished reading it, so this also felt like closing a big circle from a different life. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed the Discworld universe. It's a good place to be immersed for a while.

mr_phil's review against another edition

5.0

As usual, Pratchett is wonderful and bitingly but whimsically satirical. It's the first book with the Watch, it's got a mystic Brotherhood of idiots, and the Librarian plays an important role. What else could you need? (Apart from more Death, obviously. We could always do with more Death.)

I didn't think this was one I've read before but a lot of it was very very familiar, so I think I had.

(Also, I started the first episode of The Watch on BBC iPlayer the other day, which seems to be loosely based on this book, and it was a bit of a mess. Too much happening all at once from the first frame. Pratchett does a great job in the book of introducing characters piecemeal so you can digest them before more come along to muddy the waters. I may try and get further with the TV show but equally I may not bother.)