A review by debbysreads
The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

2.0

I wanted to like this, I really did. But it is just not my kind of fantasy. I liked Geralt, he was a great main character, and the side characters like Dandilion and Yennefer were great too but this book was just not my cup of tea. I haven't read old-fashioned high fantasy in a while, so I might have grown out of it. Also, the relentless misogyny and even p*dophilia (which were somehow never portrayed as bad things?) were disturbing, to say the least. I don't often read short stories so I didn't expect to love The Last Wish in the first place, but yeah, I'm kinda disappointed. Don't know if I'll read the sequels.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny and Violence

Moderate: Rape

There was a particularly disturbing short story about a fifteen year old girl being practically gifted off to grown ass men for marriage. Here, one of the grown men was 'entitled' to her since birth, and apparently they had been in a sexual relationship since the girl was FOURTEEN. And she also 'loves' the 35 year old man and wants to marry him. I don't need to explain how insanely fucked up that was, and how the author made NO effort to portray it as something bad. And there were many instances of misogyny and even r*pe threats - twice even made by characters we are supposed to sympathise with??? - and all of it just rubbed me the wrong way.