Season of Storms

The Classic Witcher

Starts off strong with a monster hunt and continues with nice, classic, witcher events — getting paid in a small town, interactions with royalty, Dandelion, talking with sorcerers, fighting unusual monsters and naive bandits, using a lot of signs and elixirs. And the overall setup feels pretty interesting and unique.

The ending—meaning the last two chapters—is really good and features a very unusual character and a reference to another book so a reader can understand the timeline of this story. And the epilogue tries to make the ending of The Lady of the Lake a bit more clear which works depending on your view of that ending.

So it could’ve been a good addition to The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny but there are too many unnecessary, boring and strange features. Like too much time is spent on a romance with another sorceress who is very clearly jealous about Yennefer and uses Geralt. And there are too many scene breaks, sometimes done for scenes consisting of just two or three lines and this just feels confusing to me.

And following The Lady of the Lake Sapkowski does it again but this time even bigger—a villain tells all his plans, history and problems for 8! straight pages. And then during an auction he wastes two pages to describe 7 lots with many details and how they're sold. This might be a personal nitpick but why do we need all this information?

I’ve rated this one a bit higher because of a few very nice moments—which I especially appreciate after The Lady of the Lake—but I’m probably not going to read the next one.

This is the final book in the Witcher book Series by Andrzej Sapowski. The Witcher TV Series on netflix and the games are based on this series of books.

The series follows The Witcher Geralt as he goes around the world seeking out monsters to kill for hire. A magically enhanced human that is also feared, hated, and mistrusted by the common folk despite the fact that he kills the monsters that are killing their friends and families.

Season of Storms starts out with a good old fashion monster killing from the start of the story only for our Witcher, Geralt to find him self being arrested on trumped up charges all so that a group of the worlds sorcerers could blackmail him effectively into hunting down one of their own.

During his captivity in prison Geralt discovers his famed swords have been stolen and must find a way to get them back, all the while hunting down a powerful sorcerer without his most trusted weapons.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. From start to finish there was action, adventure and fun through out. A classic Witcher story all around.

I found this books plot and story line easier to follow than others in the Witcher series and for that reason I found I enjoyed it much more than other in the series. There was not a lot of jumping between view points and characters in the other books.

I do find it interesting to note that despite its 1100-1300 era setting religion itself does not seem to play much of a role in this world. Many of the characters talk with a secular scientific mind set which I found refreshing for a book that is set in a world modeled after our own worlds history.

However some things within the book just didn't make sense to me. Near the end of the book there is a scene where a sudden storm comes upon our characters almost without warning (there is some mention of a storm coming) and with such high ferocity it's power nearly destroyed and entire town. Then just as quickly it ended in barely any time at all.

This happened with no explanation, no suggestion of magic and seems to almost come out of no where with no explanation and ended just a quickly, There seemed to be no point to this scene as I did not feel it contributed to the overall story arc in any way.

Of note, Ciri of Cintra does not make an appearance in this book, while she is present is all the other books. Ciri being one of my favorite characters from this series, it was disappointing that she was not included in this story somehow.

Overall 3.8 stars, rounded to 4 stars since I can't do partial star

Easily my least favorite of the Witcher books, even if it has some terrific Witcher moments in it. There are a lot of monsters, plenty of magic, and enough Geralt-Dandelion banter for any Witcher fan. Unfortunately, I felt that the narrative was a huge mess, lacked forward momentum, and felt almost wholly aimless and random. Also, the last 25% of the book just WOULDN'T END and I ended up skimming some of it.