Season of Storms, Witcher book #2
4.0 Stars
9-25-2020

I was waiting for some image processing to finish, and this book was laying around, and thus history is made. Previously I had read every Witcher novel except for this one, but now I can say that I've read them all. My copy of Season of Storms was an early (that is to say extremely rough) translation, with numerous mistakes with tense, sentence structure, etc. The end effect though was better than you might think, it was like listening to a story told by an elderly Yiddish man, and there were frequent occasions where the non-standard sentence structure and word choices enlivened the tale. The plot of the story, like the telling of the story, was also enjoyably "off", with it darting in several directions and folding in a number of disparate elements. E.g. Is it monster hunting? City politics and dynastic politics and law and political intrigue? Mad wizard hunting, cruel wizard loving, deep mage plotting, disaster recovery, crime lord cuffing, or fox hunting? At different times the book makes lunges in each of these directions, and at the end I would be at a loss to really describe what it was about. It does act as a transition point between the early Witcher stories (shorter and mostly unconnected tales) and the later stories which tell a longer and more standard fantasy tale. In this book the author has begun tying the short stories together into a sort of larger tale, though not one that really has any consistency or over-arching plot. I enjoyed it? It was weird and not entirely sensible, but the flavor, cynicism, and blunt expressions were a pleasant change from more standard Western story telling. It was also snappy, frequently clever, and frequently funny.