Not the end I was expecting, but the end the characters deserved ( )

A solid entry in the series. War is hell. The aftermath is just as bad. ( )

I was NOT expecting that ending!
What a way to end the saga.
There is one more book after this, Season of Storms, but it is not part of the main saga. From my understanding, it's like a love letter for the fans?

Things I loved:
-The storming of Stygga castle
-Knowing what happens to lots of side characters, i.e. how long they live
-Visiting Toussiant!
-Ciri traveling through time on Kelpie! Man can that horse ride!
-Almost textbook like description of all the battles
-Finding out how the continent ended the war and the consequences of "peace."

Things I didn't like:
-Almost textbook like description of all the battles. I wasn't a fan of the literal listing of the troops
-The weird obsession of characters trying to SA Ciri; elves and Vilgafortz. Like couldn't they use magic to create a child? I mean they are magical characters lol

This is and love her and hate. The ending took me a couple weeks to digest it to figure if I really liked it or hated it. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire series. There were Parts. I found a little redundant and a little too much sex for my liking, overall the story the world was thought out and wonderfully laid out for all to enjoy. ( )

And thus the series ends on one of this book's favorite words: a fart.

Trying to rank these books by which is worse is never going to work, because they are all, to a one, incredibly terrible. Whether that's largely because of the English translation, I have no idea. Maybe these are really good in Polish. I don't know. They're awful in English.

There are some good things in this one, as there are in a number of them. Geralt and Jaskier's relationship continues to be one of the few bright spots, and they have a three particularly good scenes together, with a smattering of other good Jaskier content. There's also a scene involving the Hildebrandt family - a family of halflings - that's quite good. Geralt's relationships with Regis and Reynart are lovely. All in all, these make what is probably only several enjoyable but individual pages in a mostly bland, forgettable, unforgiving and largely confusing slog of a book.

There's more rape. There's more sexism. Everyone is terrible. Nothing really matters. There's some good stuff for people who like Yennefer, I guess? I'm ambivalent to her existence at the best of times.

A good chunk of the middle of this book concerns a long look at the reality of warfare, the grotesque of soldiers and serving as infantry, and the cowardice of self-centered politicians. Perhaps this would be more interesting if it was written at all well, and I hadn't actually read it written well by Steven Brust in "Dragon", in a far smaller page count. Brust can also write jokes, and introduce new minor characters whom you care about, and who can still be awful in their own ways. In fact, Brust's "Dragaera" books cover many of the same things this series does, including tedious and overly complicated politics, different schools of magic involving pompous representatives, a child of destiny who can portal jump across time and space, prophecy, sword fighting, elves (many of whom are corruptible and/or corrupt)...

Basically, if you want an enjoyable series about basically everything you'll come across in this universe (except monster hunting, though there are fantasy animals, though to be fair very little monster hunting actually happens in "The Witcher"), but with like... none of the rape and almost none of the sexism as far as I can recall, and no badly used Holocaust references (and I don't mean the pogroms), just read Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books. They're funny, quicker reads, and just fun. And far better than this. It also helps that I don't want about 99% of the cast to die in those books, unlike here, where a million extras get introduced and I simply cannot care about a single one of them.

If you feel the desire to see if things got better when he published "Season of Storms" in 2013, save yourself the time, because it is just as terrible, if not worse, than all the others in the series (unless you for some reason love this series or, like me, feel compelled to finish series you start, in part because when you watch/play adaptations, you like reading the source material, then, well, I guess we both have egg on our faces). ( )