SF/F Review – Blood of Elves

Blood of Elves, by Andrzej Sapkowski

Synopsis: A series of vignettes mostly centered on a magical girl, used to build a fantasy world setting.

Book Review: The most important thing about this book is that it is not a novel. It is a series of short stories that have some characters in common, but no central narrative arch. These short stories are used to build a very deep background setting for a much longer story that I assume we will get in the following books in the series.

As such, it’s really hard for me to judge this book. Normally one can judge a short story by how well it accomplishes its goal (usually of making the reader feel something special and powerful). But the goal of these short stories isn’t that. There is entertainment along the way, to be sure! It was an absolute blast reading through the “Three Men and a Baby”-style story where these grizzled old mercenaries are trying to figure out how to care for a young girl. :D And the action is well written, when it happens. But the story goals here are almost entirely for creating a world.

I’ve written before about how important world-creation is, so I apprecaite this. The world-building on display is really impressive. But I can’t judge whether or not reading this book was worth it without having read an actual narrative.

Blood of Elves was interesting on several levels. First, the entire book gives you the feeling of someone setting up an immense number of dominos. Every story is another piece being put into place, getting set up for the grand show we’ll get eventually. It’s enticing. But we don’t get a pay off in this book. We don’t even get the beginning, we just see the set being made. It’s like when the DJ is building to a crescendo, but keeps just NOT DROPPING THE BASS and it’s both enticing and maddening.

Also, since nothing ever happens, I never really wanted to keep reading. I didn’t dislike reading it while I was doing so. But after I put it down, there was never a feeling of “I want to get back to reading this, so I can find out what happens next.” If I had lost the book I wouldn’t have gone looking for it, and it always felt a little bit like a chore getting started again, even if the process itself was interesting.

I was surprised that this was mostly about Ciri, the young girl. I had thought this was about The Witcher himself, and maybe later on the series turns into that. But if all I knew about the series came from reading this book, I would have thought it was a coming-of-age-with-magic story with Ciri as the protagonist, whose adopted dad comes around to help her out at times (and he’ll have to die sometime before the final act so she can come into her own).

Finally, since I had played Witcher III before this, it was really cool to already have all the faces and voices of the characters in my head, and already have a feeling of their personalities, and how everything looks. I don’t know what the experience of this would be for someone coming into it fresh, but having played the game before, I REALLY appreciated having that background. Having read this now, it makes so much sense that this was used as the basis of an open-world game. The author puts *TONS* of effort into creating a rich, deep, vibrant world. This is exactly the background that an open world game needs so that players can get lost in a huge, thought-out setting with a million details and characters and political interactions and things to do.

The fact that the setting up is well done but nothing actually happens makes it really really hard to judge this book. Like, how could you judge a movie after watching the first 14 minutes of it? How can you judge a book after reading the first 1.3 chapters? This series doesn’t even pretend to start telling a story yet, so there’s nothing to say “this is good” or “this isn’t good” about yet. I legitimately can’t judge this until I’ve actually read story stuff. So… technically not recommended. Once I get deeper into the series I’ll be able to actually recommend or not, I guess.

Book Club Review:  An interesting trend developed when we met – those of us who had listened to the audio book (including myself) were neutral-to-positive on the book. Those who read it in text were far less happy with it. In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense. Reading is work, and the implied promise a reader is given by an author is “this work will be worth it.” If you don’t get the pay-off in the book you purchased, you might feel cheated, even if that pay-off is much greater in a later book due to the build-up put in here. Also, it’s extra-work to read exposition, and this book has pages upon pages of exposition. It’s probably 50% exposition TBH. When one is listening to the audio book, one has to do far less work. And importantly, one can do other things at the same time as one is listening to the book, so the lack of payoff isn’t as upsetting.

So, first things first, it’s probably best to get this one in audio.

That being said, most people were still neutral-at-best about the book. Because, and I know I’m repeating myself here, not much happens in it. If you want to read this in your bookclub, I think the only way to do that is to set aside several meetings and read the series. After reading hundreds of pages of nothing happening, a group doesn’t have very much to talk about. Perhaps the series is great, but if you’re going to read just one book, this particular book is Not Recommended.