Blood of Elves - Andrzej Sapkowski

⭐ 7.5/10

(Originally written by Joseph)

This is book one of the Witcher saga which I became interested in after playing the game. The universe is really cool. It's magical and has multiple races and takes pretty obvious inspiration from Tolkien. But the book reads and tells stories more like Game of Thrones, focusing on politics and having generally a pretty grim outlook on humanity. It's also a lot more mature like GoT, though not half as graphic.

That's some pretty good company, though I'm not sure this book lives up to either for me. It may have just been the audiobook format that I didn't love for this one, because I feel like the book was actually really good. But I never felt connected to the characters, most ranging from a little lifeless (Geralt) to sometimes annoying (Ciri). Again, I think it's mostly the audiobook, because men trying to do the voice of a 12 year old girl is never going to work, so I'd like to continue this series with actual books. I felt the video game had better writing at times, maybe because this was a translation, but the great banter between peasants that I loved from the game was still there.

This book also reminded me of how unacceptably bad the show was. It's a cool world with lots of history. How could you screw this up so badly?