Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If this is your first venture into the Discworld of Terry Pratchett, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. Start with "§The Color of Magic", "The Light Fantastic", "Going Postal" or almost anything else. If I had started with this one, I would not now own every single Discworld book written by Sir Terry. Not only do I own them all, I have read each one at least 10 times, since I discovered Sir Terry 3 years ago. (Yes, I know - hard to believe, but I do love them.) Presents of choice are Pratchett books for my family and friends. The characters are seriously flawed - pale and very blurred imitations of the real characters - cardboard characters as other reviewers have stated. : Samuel Vimes - acerbic, dour, cynical Mister Vimes, laughs with "so twisty he can slide through a corkscrew sideways" Moist Von Lipwig. WHAT? (And if the author had called him "Commander Vimes" just once more, I would have been screaming at the top of my lungs.) : Mustrum Ridcully, Arch Chancellor of Unseen University, never had more than a knowing twinkle in his eye. Now he indulges in laughing. : Adora Belle Dearheart has turned into a non-smoking (from over 100 cigarettes a day) June Cleaver, "puffing" Moist¡¦s pillow and serving him a healthy (?) breakfast in bed. This is the woman whose brother called her "Killer" and Moist calls "Spike". : Lady Margolotta who speaks with absolutely no accent, has has had no problem pronouncing a"W" previously. In this book, not only can't she pronounce a "W", she seems to use only sentences that have a forest of those letters in them. : Lord Vetinari: oh lordy. Where to start? Intelligent, taciturn, secretive Vetinari has turned into a verbose, jolly good fellow who laughs with the inestimable Drumknott, his secretary. I could cry. I could go on with the way Pratchett's characters have been assassinated - truly, character assassination!- but I hope you get the idea. Rather than being a witty and funny Pratchett satire, whoever wrote this book seems to think that if he writes that the characters laughed, that makes the book funny. This writer has taken some of the things from Terry¡¦s books and just smushed them up a bit and grafted them onto other characters. Sir Terry had made the Colonel's wife pick his food for him and War's wife pick his food for him and Sam's wife Sybil pick his food for him (no unhealthy stuff like a good shrimp cocktail or lovely piece of bacon, for example). Okay, I could live with that - barely. :) But now Spike is also picking Moist's food. What? Getting married turns women into health freaks? Goblins and dwarf leaders (grags) and adulterated characters have all been stirred into a bland soup with steam engines and preachy verbosity about species other than humans and somehow this is supposed to enthrall us as the "new Terry Pratchett" book. (I had really thought, from a scene at the end of "Making Money", that Moist would be put in charge of tax collecting. I was looking forward to THAT scenario. º) Where those 5 star reviews came from is beyond me. Bought, most likely, or from someone who doesn't really know Pratchett. This isn't a terrible book. But it IS a terrible Terry Pratchett book. If you have a little time you don't know what to do with and don't want to watch paint dry, then this book is fine.