Brief book reviews: I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

[terriko]

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

My sister pointed out that although this is clearly marked as "for young readers" the very start of the book has heroine Tiffany Aching dealing with a man who has just beaten his pregnant 13 year old daughter so severely that she has a miscarriage. I do wonder whether some parents would be taken aback by this. Though to be honest, I read a lot of fairly harsh stuff as a young reader: My mother didn't shy away from encouraging me to read a lot of dark but wonderful sci fi at age 8 or so when I became a voracious consumer of books. I didn't find I Shall Wear Midnight quite as playful as some of the other discworld novels, but it made up for it in other ways. I do so love the wtich stories for the common sense magic and not magic that permeates them.

Comments

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

I've lately discovered Charles Stross' "Laundry Files" novels, and if you haven't read them yet, they're pretty awesome for CS nerds. British supernatural spy thrillers from the perspective of a "computational demonologist" navigating an occult bureaucracy---the Laundry---in a universe where mathematics and computation risk invoking dreadful beings from other universes and where magical invocations can be programmed as apps on a smartphone using the Java Occult API. Since complex computations are common as mud, exposure to the supernatural is now at an epidemic level, and everyone (in the UK) who has been exposed to them is automatically recruited by the Laundry---which means, since few people have spy talents, that the Laundry is full of accountants, HR professionals, etc, etc. And IT support staff...

They're a whole lotta fun and I've been devouring them since I discovered them.