Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Publication Date: March 17, 2009
Source: Bought/Own
Rating:
Goodreads Synopsis:
This is where the dragons went. They lie ... not dead, not asleep, but ... dormant. And although the space they occupy isn't like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly. And presumably, somewhere, there's a key...GUARDS! GUARDS! is the eighth Discworld novel - and after this, dragons will never be the same again!
Review:
I should probably preface this review with the fact that I have not read the first 7 Discworld books before picking this one up. I read online that you could jump into this overall series at certain points and this was one of them. Our book club was looking for something with dragons and that was funny and Guards! Guards! was in that category. I think just about everyone in the book club gave up on this one. I inevitably pushed through just to add it to my finished pile because I was already 75% done when I decided to bail from the club aspect.
Guards! Guards! is funny and does have dragons so it met our criteria, it was just a very weird book. I know that people love Pratchett and Discworld and maybe I would feel differently going into the series properly, but I was not feeling this one from the beginning. The first major flaw for me was that there were NO Chapters/ no chapter headings... which means (for me) no good stopping points. This also made the book club planning not great. Don't get me wrong there were breaks and transitions where there could have been headers but there weren't.
The plot of this story is essentially that some underground/illegal magicians are trying to overthrow the current leader and to do so they are going to summon a dragon to terrorize the city which would bring forth a prince to take over and rule. Their plot does not go as planned unfortunately. While we get the POV of these magicians for the plot set up, most of the book is told from the POV of the guards of the city. They are not taken seriously, they don't actually have any real rules they enforce, and are an overall farce.
The characters were interesting, and as noted, funny. The plot was good. It just all took a little too long to get into the swing of it and without the chapters/dividing points I felt like I was reading a run-on sentence. It was exhausting. If you like this series - maybe it was me and the timing of it, but this was not for me.
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