Book Review: Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

I had forgotten how good Witches Abroad was. I last read it when I was fifteen that makes it seventeen years ago. And then I thought the book was about female empowerment. About you don’t have to marry the prince or kiss the frog, and I missed all the stuff about good and evil. That makes me appreciate Terry Pratchett’s ability to write and enchant after so many years and give me a new perspective to his writing. And what he is writing about the good and evil is a spot on. That those two concepts are not so far apart as we might think. That it is hard sometimes to separate who is good and who is evil. And one small step might decide which you become. “I’m the good one.”

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” is a quote from I Shall Wear Midnight, but it fits into Witches Abroad as well for the storywise. When other people and even animals become to means to an end and not the true cause, then something is wrong. And this is what happened with Lily Weatherwax, and that is why she never knew why she was the evil one.

I loved Witches Abroad despite the somewhat messy almost ending. There were too many moving parts which needed a satisfactory ending. Those moving parts were contradictory to each other. That is my only complaint. Witches Abroad is a good book both storywise and a good book if you want to peek behind the curtains and ponder things like good and evil. It was good to remember why I loved the book so much when I was a teen, and this is a good day to remember why Terry Pratchett was not only the master of his genre but a great human being and sorely missed.

Thank you for reading!