La couronne du berger

Having previously read and enjoyed almost all the Discworld books, I approached this one with some trepidation. Would it live up to the rest of the series, or would it be a disappointment, and therefore affect my memory of Discworld as a whole.
While not the funniest of the novels, that award goes to the early ones, it still has some great humour. This is mostly generated by the Nac Mac Feegles - always up for a fight, never up for thinking they provide the comedy and the muscle when it is needed. The story centres around Tiffany and the return of the Elves to our world, but things have changed. No only does Granny Weatherwax die early in the story, but the Discworld has progressed and we have trains.
In many ways it is a story about a young woman (don't dare call her a girl) maturing under difficult circumstances. She has already proved her worth (in a previous book), but must now establish herself, and in the most difficult of roles - the 'head' witch.

It is a compelling read, and an up-to-date commentary on our times, it is not in the top half of the series in my opinion, and lacked a really good tense fight scene. The fight was left too late and covered in too little detail, so it was over before the struggle had hardly got under-way. Nevertheless it is a good read.

I've had this book on my shelf, waiting for me to read it for quite a while. My reluctance to read it wasn't because I didn't think I would enjoy it, but because I almost couldn't bear to admit that Terry Pratchett was gone, and that there would be no more novels from him.

Given the weight of all that, I'm not sure I'm capable of reviewing this book objectively. I loved it. I was always going to love it, and I'm not ashamed to say that I had a bit of a tear in my eye at various points while reading it. I love the witches (particularly Granny Weatherwax, and the non-nonsense Tiffany Aching), and this book is a wonderful tribute to them, and to Discworld itself. Like all of Terry Pratchett books, it is rich, humane and wonderfully tolerant of the messy, annoying, brave, deceitful, wonderful creatures that we humans are. It's a very fitting final book, but I wish like anything that there were still more to come.