What We're Reading: Tracy

I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett.

Great Britain has long produced some of the finest fantasy writers in the world of books. One of my modern favorites is Terry Pratchett, who was recently knighted by the Queen for his "services to literature."

Pratchett's classic fantasy series Discworld is at once original, literate, moving, thoughtful, irreverent, and hilariously funny.
Pratchett has done an equally fine job with his youth series set in the same universe, the Tiffany Aching Adventures.

Tiffany Aching is a young witch charged with caring for the inhabitants of the Chalk, a region reminiscent of southeast England, complete with loads of sheep, colorful villagers, a beneficent Baron, and a fairy mound, or, rather, a Feegle mound. (Those are Feegles on the book cover.) In this, the fourth novel of her adventures, Tiffany must handle the mundane problems of her steading (everything from sick sheep to social work) while trying to defeat a more sinister dilemma: the coming of the Cunning Man, the ghost of a witch hunter who reappears with despairing regularity over the centuries, poisoning the minds of the people and stirring up witch hunting fevers.

Best read in order, the other Tiffany Aching books are:

The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith