Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

THE BLURB:

The show must go on, as murder, music and mayhem run riot in the night...

The Opera House, Ankh-Morpork...a huge rambling building, where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by a strangely-familiar evil mastermind in a hideously-deformed evening dress...

At least, he hopes so. But Granny Weatherwax, Discworld's most famous witch, is in the audience. And she doesn't hold with that sort of thing.

So there's going to be trouble (but nevertheless a good evening's entertainment with murders you can really hum...)

"Pratchett is as funny as Wodehouse and as witty as Waugh" Independent

A great parody of opera and broadway

The two main witches of Lancre have an adventure in the opera house of Anke-Morpork all the while experiencing a parade of The phantom of the Opera and other theater productions.

I quite enjoy this one, which is readable and amiable and features the witches, who are not up against any really stiff opposition this time. It also features Agnes Nitt, a young and ample lady who is maybe destined to be a witch but wants to be an opera singer instead.

It's not one of my favourites, perhaps because I'm not an opera fan, and furthermore I know nothing about The Phantom of the Opera. Also perhaps because it's lacking in regular characters, apart from Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Greebo the cat. (And Death, who always turns up everywhere, sooner or later.)

Agnes Nitt is a semi-regular character: she appears in a few other Discworld books.

The one-off characters created for this story are OK, but I don't mind that we won't see them again.

A rollicking adventure with many humourous bits that has somewhat depreciated thanks to the fatphobic and ableist attitudes prevalent in 1995 that have infused so much of this book. There's also a whiff of very old stereotypes insisting the conventionally pretty female must be dumb and/or selectively calculating and shallow, and the not conventionally pretty female must be clever and decent. Pretty light on social commentary or interesting underlying message too. Not my fave Discworld book.