Review: The Lady of the Lake

The Lady of the Lake by Andrzej Sapkowski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

All I have are general thoughts. After reading two collections of short stories and five novels, it's difficult to separate my thoughts into a focused attempt to review this book. Every reviewed sentence is in someway a generalization on the series itself instead of a singular critique. But I'll do the best I can.

"The Lady of the Lake" is a good end to a decent book series. As with the other novels, the prose and characters are colorful and well defined, but it has serious structural problems. As an example, Geralt spends the first half of the novel on vacation. Undermining any sense of progression and serves more as colorful filler than anything else. The book is then sectioned by a fabulous, exceeding long, chapter that contains ninety percent of the plot progression for the entire book series. Then is concluded by actions with no real build-up and the resolution feels non sequitur. Like I said, structure problems.

Overall the Witcher series has a healthy dose of influences that range from fairy tales to Norse mythology but has enough original ideas to keep it from feeling like a ripoff. The writing is good but can feel a little full of itself. With enough edits to reduce the filler and wandering around, this could have easily been a far more satisfying trilogy. It wasn't so much that I felt like the author was wasting my time, more so that I felt like he was wasting the time of the characters.

One last thing. Like many, I became involved with this universe through the video game series. The world and characters dragged me in over a decade ago and I haven't been able to leave since. I read the book merely to bring myself fully involved in the universe. Here's the thing, and it might inflame some people, the writing in the games is better. The dialogue is punchy and consistently clever. It takes the world-building and characters of the novels and crafts a far more engaging story. It even resolves some of the more loose plot threads of the books with better ideas. An argument can be made that the games are serviced by a more visual media, but I don't think that's the case. I think they just took a dim jewel, added some talented polish, and made it shine.

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