This is a late post because The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapowski was my February pick and I finished it that same month. Funny thing: when I got to the last page of the book, I realized that I’ve already read it before.
I started reading it after the first season of the Witcher series came out on Netflix, and it seems I just forgot about the entire thing. In my mind, I only got halfway through the book and put it down. I decided to pick it up again this year and since I couldn’t remember much about it, I started over.
When I was reading it, I kept waiting to get to the part where I stopped before, but then suddenly I was at the end. My memory sucks. LOL.
The Last Wish (The Witcher #0.5)
by Andrzej Sapkowski, Danusia Stok (Translator)
Geralt the Witcher—revered and hated—is a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent.
But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good… and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.
(Summary from Goodreads)
Anyway, it’s a good read. I love all the mythology and the interesting characters, human and otherwise. The stories in this collection are in the first season of the show—not exactly the same, but pretty close. I enjoyed the writing, but wondered at times about the Polish nuances that got lost in the translation. I’ve read a few online discussions that mentioned this, so I’ve been curious. The official English translation is supposed to be good though, so I guess I’m not really missing a lot. I hope.
I don’t know, but TV Geralt seems rougher and grittier than Book Geralt. Maybe it’s just because Henry Cavill plays him that way and so well, too. It also doesn’t help that I saw the series first and it formed the idea of Geralt for me so I was already looking for that in the book. I think the series (Season 1, I mean) and the book are both good though.
So, it was good to re-read this book. I’m not jumping into the next Witcher book just yet, but I hope to read the rest of the books soon.