The Wee Free Men
A riotous, wise, and gripping junior Discworld novel from the Carnegie Medal-winning author and acknowledged master of comic fantasy.Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching thinks her Granny Aching - a wise shepherd - might have been a witch, but now Granny Aching is dead and it's up to Tiffany to work it all out when strange things begin happening: a fairy-tale monster in the stream, a headless horseman and, strangest of all, the tiny blue men in kilts, the Wee Free Men, who have come looking for the new 'hag'. These are the Nac Mac Feegles, the pictsies, who like nothing better than thievin', fightin' and drinkin'. Then Tiffany's young brother goes missing and Tiffany and the Wee Free Men must join forces to save him from the Queen of the Fairies
Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
8people
2014–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- ”The Count of Monte Cristo”, one of my favorites. It’s a classic the general story being jailbreak/revenge. A little slow paced at times but the writing is fantastic.
If you enjoy fantasy novels I would recommend ”The Wee Free Men” by Terry Pratchett, it’s outstanding.
- Diane Stanley
And, Terry Pratchett: Wee Free Men
Of course all the rest of Terry Pratchett is there to grow into.
- +1 for Mort. It is fantastic. And it is about death, so it's highly, should I dare say, appropriate for the occasion.
The Wee Free Men and Dodger are also nice to read. They focus a bit less on humour, being geared a little more towards children. Don't expect to laugh all the time. But the settings of these stories are magical.
- Recently finished:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow -- frankly, I found it kind of boring, and also found the narrator unsympathetic. I'm not sure if the author intended him to be an Unreliable Narrator or not.
Facts, Values, and Norms by Peter Railton -- Gains three stars for combining serious consideration of ethical and meta-ethical issues with a completely naturalistic worldview and a genuine grappling with history and ideology. Loses two stars for being far, far too long-winded and using vague, colloquial terminology and appeals to intuition where a methodoological naturalist can and should appeal to the fruits of science. (Copy-pasta'd from my Amazon review)
Rapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross -- pretty funny, even if it made a transhuman superintelligent supercivilization look kind of... dumb.
Currently re-reading for fun:
The Wee Free Men and I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett -- It's Discworld. Go read them. NOW. And read A Hat Full of Sky in the middle.
Then there's been a lot of textbooks I've been reading, which I won't list. Though...
Logical Labyrinths by Raymond Smullyan -- dense, and fun, a graduate-level intro textbook to first-order logic disguised as a logic textbook.
- > I think an under appreciated subset of Discworld is the Tiffany Aching series.
Yeah, the author indicates he skipped them, probably because of the YA moniker, but honestly, _maybe_ Wee Free Men exempted, they're equally as mature as any other discworld books, with really the only YA thing about them being their underage protagonist.
- “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” ― Seneca
I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have. -Coleman Cox
“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.” ― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Hard work lets you capitalize on small opportunities. Without it you'd need a 3-sigma occurrence to benefit. Of course, those are the types you hear about, because they make great stories.
