Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

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This is the third in the series that started with The Wee Free Men. I've never been able to get into Pratchett's Discworld series, but I love the "Tiffany Aching Adventures" in this series. Tiffany is a young but very powerful witch. She is connected to unseen forces, but is also extremely practical. This book has her accidentally dancing with the god of winter, and thereby accidentally taking the role of summer for herself, until the real summer has to be rescued from the underworld and the balance brought to rights again. There's lots of charcteristic Pratchett humor, including the fact that the Wintersmith demonstrates his love for Tiffany with Tiffany-shaped snowflakes and floating glaciers. As usual, the Nac Mac Feegle are a great help and highly amusing, as they bluster their way down into the underworld and back again.

I had an extremely taxing week, which involved outlining several dissertation chapters and taking notes on the entire decade of the 1890s in Library Journal, meetings with the afterschool and Family Resiliency Center folks, and the interviews for a director candidate of Urbana Free. I more than earned this Saturday escape into amusing fantasy, and I reveled in it thoroughly, in the comfort of our newly rearranged living room.

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