Reviews and Comments

Terry Pratchett seamlessly traverses the humorous and heartfelt in this book. It's a lovely coming-of-age story with pacing that never leaves you wondering when something exciting is going to happen next. While Tiffany Aching doesn't particularly read as a 9-year-old girl, her character is so sassy and enjoyable to behold that it's hard to be bothered by her rather adult attitude.

Pratchett espouses on the responsibility we have towards our community and our families, no matter how dumb or difficult they may be, and left me thinking about how we could all stand to embrace our inner witch a little more.

This book was a pretty enjoyable mixture of cringe humor, pure cringe, and sadness. We're drawn into a character that has moments of lucidity but is otherwise completely swept up in a paranoid narrative of the world. The constant references to Jim Jones and Jonestown seem placed in such a way that you subtly draw parallels between the protagonist and Jim Jones. It was an interesting read about a character who's characterization only seems to humanize her to a point where you can see her as something other than an idea personified. It started off very strong and very funny, but lost a lot of its momentum in the final third of the book.

Interesting in concept, arrogant and anglocentric in actuality. Timothy Leary presents important techniques and ideas for attaining meaningful experiences on psychedelics and the psychedelic experience, but has the audacity to claim that psychedelics are some kind "cheat code" that bypasses years of spiritual study and practice. His tone towards eastern cultures and their spiritual practices carries a condescending tone throughout the reading, and his attitude comes of as blinded excitement at best, patronizing appropriation at worst.

However, I do think that this text is important as a piece of historical documentation as to the spiritual awakening that was happening in much of Western society at the time, and as an introduction to the concept of set and setting. Keeping that in mind, I would recommend reading this book.

The book started out strong, however it really seemed to drag on by the end. While the book seemed to be an exploration of misfortune, none of the characters actually seemed to grow, and oftentimes the actions that set the characters down the path of misery are so out-of-character. I ended up getting ~90% of the way through the book before it wore out its welcome.

A good read, although I think that it would succeed much more in a format other than a novel. The book poses a lot of questions and doesn't really seem to be interested in building the world in such a way that those questions can be answered. The characterization of the various gods felt like it was trying to avoid caricaturization to the point where it felt like these were just random people thrust into the identity of a god with motivations unrelated to their historical personalities.

I'm not sure I really agreed with the pacing of the book either. 90% exposition, incredibly short rising action, and then an incredibly unsatisfying climax.