I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the Witcher games, and the relationship usually ended more on the meh side. I thought the world they were set in was beautiful but I was never patient enough to sit around and enjoy it. I wanted to watch the show but I heard it was quite gory, and I don’t do well with gore in live-action shows. Instead, I chose to settle for simply reading the books.
These books are not the most straightforward series. It starts with several prequels and if you don’t read the prequels, you won’t understand the main story. So you have to get through several short stories before you truly get into Geralt’s long-form adventure. This was no problem for me as some of these short stories actually matched the parts of The Witcher 3 that I had played and that I had enjoyed.
The Last Wish tells the tale of some of Geralt’s earlier escapades and introduces some characters that will be important later on in the series. You get to see Geralt reflect on his past and how he’s grown over the years, as well as see some of the truly horrible people that Geralt was hired to work for as a witcher. The life of a witcher is interesting, you are the one who is shunned from society even though most of these stories were about how the actions of regular people created or invited the monsters into their lives. The witchers are distrusted until they are needed.
To be honest, I didn’t find this story to be as annoying as I find some male-main-character fantasy novels to be. Even though they had some of those typical male-gaze tropes, I still actually liked the women in this story. They were all unique even though they had been through some trauma in this hellish world, and I genuinely wanted to learn more about them. My only complaint was because this is a short story compilation that I didn’t have enough time to really get to know the characters. I would feel very engaged in one storyline, and then it would be over and I would be whisked to a completely different area with characters that I felt were less compelling. Hopefully, I will be able to have more time with the characters in future books.
This is the start to what I think will be a truly wonderful series. I immediately checked out the next two novels in the series after finishing this one from the library, but I didn’t have the time to read them before they were due. Hopefully, in 2022 I will be able to finish the rest of the series!
I would recommend this series to anyone looking for new adult fantasy novels.
Overall Ratings: 4 out of 5 books.
