Review: Thief of Time

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. I left the rating at 3/5

I debated dropping the rating to 2 stars (“It was OK”), but Lu-Tze was enough to keep it at 3 stars. I am not sure if we learned his name back then, but I think we’re meant to associate him with the person who nudged Brutha in Small Gods. (Or maybe it was explicitly stated, but while reading a few books at once and stretching this one out over months, I’ve forgotten) He’s definitely in Night Watch, so Pratchett had fun with the character.

This book is essentially half a parody of kung fu movies and half about the Auditors of Time (Death’s nemesis) and their most recent scheme to bring the world into order. I’m not sure if the faux-asian puns in the kung fu half of the story would now be considered offensive, but I find them, like most of Pratchett’s puns, to be firmly in dad joke territory.

The overall plot is slightly convoluted and it seems to me that Pratchett first came up with the Time Monks and then the rest of the plot. We have Death’s Granddaughter against the Auditors and she’s definitely not my favorite character, although this is her best book yet. I enjoyed reading about how she ran her classroom. Oh yeah, there’s also a C-plot that’s a parody of the fifth member of The Beatles.

This is definitely a skippable Discworld book unless you’re a reading the Night Watch sub-series of books and want to know where Lu-Tze came from in the book Night Watch.

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