Sword of Destiny ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Last year, I watched the Witcher when it came out on Netflix and adored it, so much that I downloaded the first game. I enjoyed that too, so I bought the first book and loved it. I bought the second book and just couldn’t get into it. As I had loved the aforementioned Witcher material, I thought that another book of short stories set in the Continent would get me out of my reading slump, I only managed fifty pages before DNF’ing Sword of Destiny. So, I thought I’d try it again this year; it went far more successfully.

I very much love the universe that Andrzej Sapkowski has created for his Witcher books. There’s everything I love about fantasy books without it being so heavy in lore (although it might help that I’m already familiar with the world).

Sword of Destiny features six stories that tell little snippets of Geralt and his friends’ lives. It explains how some characters meet and defines other relationships.

The first story is The Bounds of Reason, a story in which Geralt, Dandelion and Yennefer all travel up a mountain to slay a dragon. Geralt, however, doesn’t kill dragons, it goes against his moral code and yet he ventures up the mountain anyway. It’s a story that features in the Netflix series and it was interesting to see the differences and how Sapkowski describes some of the characters that just aren’t the focus in the episode. 

So, I don’t make this review too long, I’m going to combine story two, A Shard of Ice, and story four, A Little Sacrifice. Both these stories are loosely inspired by some of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales. A Shard of Ice mentions the story of the Snow Queen who drops shards of ice turning people cruel. A Little Sacrifice is loosely inspired by The Little Mermaid. What I loved about both these stories is that they both take the piss out of Hans Christian Anderson’s stories whilst also paying them a huge amount of respect.

Story three is called Eternal Flame and features Geralt, Dandelion and their dwarven friends. This one includes a shifter who takes the place of one of Geralt and Dandelion’s dwarven friends. Surprisingly, this story becomes an inside look into the politics of the Continent, especially in the free city of Novigrad. 

Stories five and six (The Sword of Destiny and Something More, respectively), tell of the beginning of Geralt’s relationship with his child of surprise Cirilla. Both these stories are in the Netflix series. The Sword of Destiny is quite different in the book than the Netflix show, as Geralt doesn’t appear in Netflix’s adaptation, whereas Something More is pretty closely matched. Normally, I’m the type of person who insists that shows and movies ought to match the book closer than they do, but in regards to these stories, it makes sense what Netflix has done. I really enjoyed these last two, partially because they were familiar and partially because I loved seeing Geralt interact with a slightly bratty and determined princess. 

I really enjoyed these stories and can’t wait to get stuck into the next book, nor can I wait for the second series to come out on Netflix. Overall, I give it four stars.

C🌙