Reviews with content warning for Body horror - Mort

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Mort by Terry Pratchett

2 reviews

vigil's review against another edition

adventurous emotional funny lighthearted reflective medium-paced

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

3.5

this is a tough one for me to puzzle out enough for a proper rating. once the main plot with princess keli kicked off, i realized almost immediately i didn't care about it or her. i actually wanted the "no one escapes death" ending rather than the plucky hero changes reality out of pluckiness that i got. the hero himself, mort, was only enjoyable as a protagonist up to a point, and after just got bullheaded, unreasonable, and overall grating. he was right, he definitely wasn't cut out for this kind of job. i found his romance with ysabell to be both abrupt and bland, and clearly set up for the plot following the later books with susan (from the knowledge i gathered when i looked up the death series) who is hopefully more engaging. i felt apathetic towards the death vs mort scene towards the end, and the way death acted didn't quite seem to be in line with the character in the rest of the book. the book is over three decades old, so the subtle fatphobia annoyed, but didn't shock me. the hints of attraction between cutwell and keli who are 20 and 15 respectively was disgusting and didn't need to be included at all.

all this aside, i really enjoyed death as a character, the atmosphere of discworld, and pratchett's writing style that even though i was ambivalent to most of the plot, kept me entertained.

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bluejayreads's review

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adventurous medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Reading the early Discworld books after having read almost exclusively later books is a wild experience. I’m curious to find the point in the series where it changes from Discworld-crossing fate-of-the-world adventures to geographically-limited profound human stories.

This book came very close to being the first Discworld book that I didn’t finish, and its saving grace was that it’s so short. By the time I got well and truly fed up I only had an hour and a half left and I figured at that point I might as well finish the thing.

Mort follows Mort, a farmer’s son who gets apprenticed to Death and completely screws up everything because he saw a pretty face. That is literally his motivation. He glimpsed a pretty girl while in the middle of doing something else and proceeds to fall so head over heels for this girl who is pretty and whom he has never spoken to that his actions start unraveling the very fabric of reality. And he does his gosh darned best to avoid putting it right despite one method of putting it right requiring him to do absolutely nothing and let a thing happen. This is not technically an idiot plot because Mort is the only real idiot here, but I suppose Death is partially at fault too for giving his apprentice a ton of responsibility and then not bothering to check on him.

Death himself is a pretty neat character to follow around, and I think I would have preferred the book to be about him. Mort isn’t awful as a character, except for the idiot part, but a couple of jarring fast-forwards through time make his growing-up process feel weirdly abrupt (and yet he doesn’t grow out of being an idiot). Death’s adopted daughter is rude, bratty, and obnoxious, and yet like Malicia in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, she is justified and rewarded for it in the end. I hate it and I hate her, but luckily from the ending I don’t think she’ll be showing up again.

The Discworld is cool. Death is awesome. Mort is an idiot, Death’s daughter is obnoxious, and the entire plot could have been avoided if Mort was less of an idiot for a pretty face or if Death actually checked his apprentice’s work. There’s a lot of great ideas here, and I hope they get to be in a better story in the next book featuring Death.

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