Terry Pratchett returned to the Discworld with Tiffany Aching’s fourth outing as the teenage witch of the chalk and this time she’s got the furious intensity of the Charming Man to face. It’s been a roller-coaster ride getting this far in the series, but if you thought the Fairy Queen, The Hiver or the Wintersmith were tough opposition, you’re in for some serious intensity in I Shall Wear Midnight.
With three Discworld novels starring the young witch under his belt by this stage, and two more in this and The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett had clearly found a new character that he liked writing about in his final years. With a hardback release date of 2nd September 2010, followed by the paperback release in June 2012, the book unleashed more of Pratchett’s brilliantly wild and witty imagination on the comedic fantasy book lovers’ literary world.
In I Shall Wear midnight, Tiffany faces a ghostly ancient evil that has stirred up old suspicion about witches, making Tiifany’s life as a teen witch even tougher than it previously was, especially now she’s got her own steading on the Chalk to look after. However, the dreaded Charming Man is also hunting Tiffany too, so she’s going to need the help of the Nac Mac Feegle, her tiny blue skinned clan of psuedo-Scottish mentalists, if she’s going to get through the onslaught.
She may well have faced down the Fairy Queen and her elfin horde in The Wee Free Men, the life force sucking Hiver in A Hat Full Of Sky and the Wintersmith in Wintersmith, but the Charming Man takes things up a notch on the malevolence scale. To make things worse, she also needs to deal with having the worst relationship with her former young suitor, Roland, and the weight of expectation from the other witches, so she’s got her teenage angst cut out for her.
Whether you’re a fan of Terry Pratchett’s work or not, you can’t help but admire the sheer scale of his achievements. The sprawling range of characters that he’s created, and the 40+ Discworld novels that he has written are immense; his work has even been turned into a number of theatre productions (like Nation). His achievements are all the more impressive with the fact that in 2007 he announced that he was suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s decease and it’s with a heavy heart that we said fairwell to him following his death in spring 2015.
I Shall Wear Midnight, was always bound to be wonderfully dark and imaginative, with crazy plot twists and mad mad characters and that’s exactly how it turned out. It was as genius-filled as a lot of his previous work and given a choice between Twilight or one of the Tiffany Aching novels to read, we know which way our disc-like coin would fall. Read our full review for more details.
