Sword of Destiny

Somehow, when I first read The Witcher, I ended up skipping this book. This time around, I grabbed it and read it from front to back. It's a great book, even if it's not as good as The Last Wish. But the ending is...oh man! So good, so compelling. Geralt of Rivia is one of my favorite fantasy characters ever.

I had to wait a while to get to this second short collection because of the wait at the library. But I'm glad I did, because it gave me an opportunity to savor the experience of the previous one and enjoy this even more.

As with any collection, this one had a couple of amazing stories and a few bored me. As a very dialogue heavy writing style, this one too had many many conversations which I thought were pointless, but some of them were profound and emotional too, so I don't wanna dismiss it all entirely. But it's the couple of stories which were part of the TV show which I had the most fun reading. I definitely like that Dandelion is much more prominently featured in the stories, Yennefer here is a little less fiery and more emotionally available, and Geralt is a grumpy delight. There's one story featuring a new character Essi which made me very emotional, and it was just so beautifully tragic. But it was the introduction of Ciri that stole the show, and I can't believe how different the first meeting of Ciri and Geralt is. I definitely would have loved to see that in the show. And the ending was amazing, with the exact final scene from the show playing in my head and on the page.

In conclusion, I'm having as much fun reading these books as I was watching the adaptation. Both the similarities and differences are quite exciting to explore and I can't wait to finally dive into the novels which will bring a whole new story. The writing (or maybe the translation) isn't always easy to follow, but hopefully I'll get used to it. The wait times for the next books seem to be quite high at my library, so I hope I'll be able to finish them all before the start of the next season.