The Lady of the Lake

Part five of “Geralt is again the Witcher”

The intro has a lot of time jumps and involves a few new, secondary characters and the latter feels a bit unnecessary. Toussaint is an interesting change of environment with all the knights and vineyards but Fringilla is so cliche that I find it unbelievable that Geralt with all his experience has fallen for her trap. Fortunately there’s some monster hunting happening, so it’s fine.

There are a couple of pretty important places presented here like it’s not the last book in the series. And overall the amount of descriptions for the same kind of events is a bit weird—in one place it’s just one line and then a scene break, in another it’s a page or two. Most of the descriptions of Ciri's travels just waste time and it feels like even the author knows it because at some point he gives a few short descriptions of different places in a row and then says "there were even more places". And then there’s another one which wastes two pages on some random astronomer who can't say anything to Ciri—because of his shock?—and misses a very rare comet because of her, this is supposed to be funny, I guess. And then Sapkowski spends time to scientifically describe and prove The White Frost. Do we really need that in a fantasy world?

Some side characters from previous books, who haven’t appeared for a long time, return here, sometimes we're even shown their point of view. Like Jarre who has changed a lot and goes through some hard times, his story line is very interesting. And sometimes you have a hard time remembering who that character is because her previous appearance is in Blood of Elves.

Ciri and Vilgefortz interaction is just boring—he talks too much, she can't do anything. However that whole episode is one of the best parts of the book, it’s like the final point of the whole adventure, that’s what all characters have been going towards all this time. And we get a big battle where almost everybody is involved, it’s really nice.

The problem is that it’s only the middle of the book and it feels like the ending of the series, it's very confusing. But it just drags afterwards with a lot of politics and some random, unnecessary side quests. It feels like Sapkowski got tired of writing The Witcher and didn't know what to do with these characters.

The ending is ambiguous. Sex scene in the royal library is too much. The story moves forward just by pure coincidence more than once. The emperor suddenly tells us his life story for a few pages. The elves are just gone from the story after their big setup.

I just hope that Season of Storms is better.

The last book of The Witcher saga! I loved the first half of the book with its parallel universes and the fact that the story of The Witcher is viewed as a type of distant land fairy tale. One thing that this author can do is create complex characters, meaning, no one is ever lawful good, everybody is chaotic (neutral, good or evil). Themes like misogyny, slavery and racial discrimination are all present in the story.

We discover that there are elves and humans living in different dimensions but everybody is trapped in their own worlds, except for some with unique powers who can travel between timelines.
Everybody is looking for Ciri because of her extraordinary powers. Elves can be as evil as humans and sorceresses. And Ciri is on her own quest to escape what everybody think is her destiny.

I took a few days to grasp the ending, which can be interpreted in different ways.?? Both The Witcher and Yennefer die and after their deaths Ciri leaves everything behind and go to a parallel universe where Galahad from the Arthurian legends lives. The book begins with Ciri talking to Galahad and so the whole book is the retelling of her story to him. ??
I think the story is brilliantly written, with varying points of view, snippets of Dandelion's memoir “Half a Century of Poetry”, a huge battle being described through its actual combatants suffering and the healers in a war field hospital.

But people die. Lots of characters die. And that's what makes this series “dark fantasy” in my opinion. It has the feel of a fairy tale without the happy ending. Or maybe the ending is happy depending on how you interpret the ending. I had mixed feelings in the end, but in my head the ending had this dramatic sad tone.

Excellent series overall with rich world building and interesting characters. It was a nice ride!??

spoilers!!

Is it just me, or was everything that ever happened and every bit of character development that occurred over the last 4 books totally and completely for nothing? I am thoroughly underwhelmed by how this series ended.

Geralt, our bad-ass, sarcastic, and determined Witcher? Yeah, makes sense that he will actually be one of the blandest characters and will proceed to ultimately “die” in the lamest, most un-heroic way possible and settle for domesticity. Yennefer, again, another bad-ass, determined character, contributes nothing interesting but being able to throw shields up during fights and then just kind of sucks at other attempts at magic. Ciri, the character in which the last 4 books have built up to be someone powerful and important? She escapes her many foes trying to use and abuse her, only to never regain any sort of power or do anything important for the world. She only manages some heroics at the end with Geralt and Yen because of her dumb unicorn, and then she just kind of blips out to also settle for domesticity? So out of character, so anticlimactic.

And why God, why, did I have to follow any part of Jarre or Iola's story? So boring and it was time that could have been spent on our main characters so their storyline didn't suck.

I'm not sure I can even express the disappointment of how Geralt's party all die in unbelievably lame ways. Or how I'm supposed to believe Emehr, after tearing the world apart in war to find Ciri, just gives her up because he saw that she was sad??

Otherwise, there was some decent writing and plenty of scenes that were fun to read. This was on it's way to being my favorite fantasy series. I absolutely love the world and characters. I look forward to the Netflix show hopefully salvaging the wreckage of this final book. In the mean time, I will continue to play the Witcher 3 and pretend that it is canon, hopefully erasing the unfortunate storyline of this final book.

2.5 stars.