The thirty-fifth book of Discworld is also the third Tiffany Aching book. The Wintersmith has taken an interest in her, to the detriment of the people on the chalk, and she has to deal with his unwelcome attention.
All while she is studying under another witch, this time a witch known as Miss Treason, a witch that is over one hundred years old and refers to Granny Weatherwax as a girl. She’s blind and at least partially deaf, but she borrows animals and her trainee witches to see and hear, a fact that sees many young potential witches leave her from their dislike of her doing so, although Tiffany also isn’t a fan, she at least can tolerate it.
While Tiffany is training with the elderly crone, they go to witness a special event, but Tiffany gets caught up in it, and draws the attention of the Wintersmith, the personification of the winter season, and it’s quickly obvious that he’s obsessed with her. This obsession and her displacement of the normal queen of summer is the main plot of this volume, but the interplay of the older witches with the up and coming coven that Annagramma started in the prior Tiffany book, A Hat Full of Sky, is also very important here.
The Wintersmith shows interest in understanding Tiffany and what it means to be human. He also lets her know that he’s taken a shine to her in ways that she finds both flattering and worrying. He seems to find her via the horse necklace that Roland gave her, although she is loathe to part with it, Granny Weatherwax finally convinces her to let it go, although the fate of the silver horse is not so simple.
Both the Wintersmith and the Queen of Summer are gods of a sort, but they are elementals, so not true gods, although they have great power over their respective seasons. One thing they aren’t is human. They have some human ideas associated with them, just like most Discworld deities and personifications of concepts like Death and Time do, but they aren’t actually human. Because Tiffany danced with the Wintersmith and he saw her as the Queen of Summer, things are all off kilter.
Tiffany starts having things sprout around her feet, a phenomenon that Nanny was ready for, although it still damaged her floorboards when Tiffany was staying with her. And then the cornucopia arrives, and they have to deal with that thing, with amusing results, including a lot of chickens. The actual Queen is not exactly a fan of Tiffany, and she lets it be known at certain times during the story, causing Tiffany extra problems.
The main thing here is that Tiffany is thirteen in this book, so she’s a teenager, she has feeling for Roland, even as she denies it to the other witches who give her a knowing grin when the subject is broached. Then the Wintersmith enters the scene and his borderline worship of her, and the ways he shows his affection, and especially his odd way of trying to become a man, provoke mixed feelings in the young witch. Although the dangerous cold hitting her beloved homeland on the chalk alters her feelings towards the Wintersmith as things progress.
Early on, the witches have to deal with a loss of one of their own, and this causes some ripples in the witch community. It heavily involves both Tiffany and Annagramma among others, and especially Miss Treason, who is at the center of it all. Annagramma has issues that she can't handle alone, so Tiffany feels she must help in spite of herself.
With Annagramma more or less settled in thanks to lots of help from the others, Tiffany can turn her attention back to dealing with the attentions of the Wintersmith. Granny, Nanny, and the Nac Mac Feegles are also involved now, and their involvement eventually extends to Roland. They need a hero to go and retrieve the Queen of Summer so she can take her proper place in the dance of seasons and to free Tiffany from her current situation, and Roland has to do his best to fill that role, with mixed results.
A quick note on Roland. When we first him in The Wee Free Men he was under the influence of the fairy queen and was a bit of a lout. He wasn’t awful once he was free of the queen’s insidious power, but he wasn’t exactly a model young man either. We didn’t get much about him in A Hat Full of Sky, but Tiffany’s reactions and what we were fed made it obvious he had grown immensely as a character, and we see that firsthand here. Not only did he help save the Summer Queen, but we also see him dealing with his rather nasty aunts that want to dominate him while his father, the baron of the chalk, is very ill. He outwits them several times and in amusing ways. He’s less in his element when going to rescue the Queen, but that’s to be expected. The relationship between Tiffany and Roland is adorable.
Annagramma ends up growing a bit too. Not as much as Roland, Tiffany, or even Petulia, but she still goes through some character development. She’s still insufferable at times, but she does come around enough to be a real witch, at least by Granny Weatherwax’s reckoning, and she does help Tiffany about in a pinch. She’s not one of my favorites, but seeing growth like hers is still good.
As the book reaches its conclusion, Tiffany must deal directly with the love-struck Wintersmith while Roland follows the Nac Mac Feelges into a land of nightmares to rescue the goddess that Tiffany inadvertently supplanted. And all this must be done so that the seasons will properly function. An eternal winter or summer is not good for the Disc or its inhabitants.
This is my favorite Tiffany Aching book to date. It has a bit of a resemblance to aspects of Thief of Time and Hogfather, but it also brings more of its own flavor to the story. Having the wonderful Nanny Ogg and the irascible but excellent Granny Weatherwax feature strongly here really made parts of the book sing for me. Tiffany is highly intelligent and insightful, but being a young teen means she has those aspects as well, making her believable while also being unique in an enjoyable way. It’s not quite up there with the very best Sir Terry has to offer, but it’s a great read, and I’m curious how the remaining two books on Tiffany build on the three we’ve had of her so far.
3.625 Morris Dances out of 4.
Some fun quotes:
A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.
“I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.”
“That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?”
Morella is a Gen Xer who likes strange things a bit too much.
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