Blood of Elves ~ Andrzej Sapkowsi

I’m slowly making my way through everything Witcher. I’m making my way through the DLCs for Witcher 3 and have just finished reading Blood of Elves.

I enjoyed Blood of Elves but it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. Blood of Elves is preceded by two collections of short stories that really sell what a witcher is and does. The Netflix series and the games also do this. They make being a witcher an action-packed job that is just going from monster hunt to quest back to monster hunt. Blood of Elves doesn’t follow this pattern. In fact, there’s quite a lack of monster hunting. I did miss it, but everything still felt quite urgent, so it wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it was going to be.

Unlike the previous two books, Geralt is not the only protagonist in this novel. The novel has a third-person narrator and often skips between different protagonists. Mostly, it follows Geralt and Ciri, but also Triss Merigold and Dandilion. There are also a few snippets from other characters such as mages, royalty and mercenaries. Instead of being overwhelming, Sapkowski has managed to write the narrative focuses in such a way that it provides a larger understanding of the state of the continent at the time of the novel’s setting. 

With a lot of the story taken up by teaching Ciri about being a witcher and then tutoring her in magic, we learn so much about the characters without having to go into expositional dialogue. The information flows in a way that doesn’t seem forced or hastily remembered. The magical theory in this universe is fascinating to read about and so is the political history. I’m actually looking forward to reading how the situation with Nilfgaard plays out.

I will admit that I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two books, but it still gets four stars. My biggest problem with this novel was the length of the chapters. A three-hundred-page book should not have only seven chapters.

C🌙