onefineslime 's review for:

Lady of the Lake by Andrzej Sapkowski

3.75

adventurous dark slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Sapkowski is fantastic at writing interesting and lovable characters, and that is both a blessing and a curse in this book. Because, already having written a lovely cast of main characters that you care deeply about  and really want to follow on their epic journey, he just can’t stop: he writes more characters, and more characters, and every single one of those characters needs to have a fleshed out storyline. And you’re left like, “who are these people, I want my lovable main characters back” and he’s like “ok I’ll give you a couple pages about them, as a treat. And then kill them all off so I can get back to what I do best: writing more characters.”

Seriously, when

Milva died I was sad, but when Cahir died I was like “wait, he’s not just gonna kill all of them off is he”, and then when Anguleme died I was like “he’s gonna kill all of them off” and was so irritated. The deaths were handled so casually that I thought they couldn’t be for real, that Ciri was going to jump back in time and save them or something. I’d been looking forward to interactions between that whole band and Yennefer and Ciri, a reunion with Dandelion where they all tell him about how things went down, etc. We don’t even get some cathartic coming to terms with their deaths like we do with Ciri and the rats at their grave. I think Sapkowski literally killed them off just to avoid writing those scenes, so he could get back to writing more scenes about a random elf.