Equal Rites
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Well yeah I broke my rule of rating every Pratchett book with 5 stars BUT this doesn't mean I don't like it, it's only that I didn't enjoy it as much as other Discworld books. Think of this as a 4.99 rating (yes I'm a Pratchett fanboy deal with it).
This is the third Discworld book and the first one of the witches series.
In the small town of Bad Ass, an eighth child of an eighth son is born and as the rites say, he is bound to be a wizard. The only problem is that this eighth child is actually a girl and girls are supposed to be witches but young Eskarina Smith is determined to learn "boys magic" and she will do anything to study in the Unseen University, even if she has to face the other wizards and their prejudices.
That's basically the whole idea of this novel, the entire book is about how different boys and girls are and that's wonderfully described by Pratchett: boys (wizards) practice more brutal and violent magic whereas girls (witches) use magic in a more natural way.
Although it's a really clever and funny way to criticise how women are discriminated, I found the first half of the book a little dull (which never happened while reading other Pratchett book) but towards the ending the story got better. Also the books ends with a wonderful metaphor about life that I thought it was outstanding.
In comparison with the previous books (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic) this one seemed to be more critical of our reality.
The thing that I enjoyed the most was Granny Watherwax, the witch that teaches Eskarina his first lessons about life and introduces the concept of headology: a practice that rely on the principle that what people believes is what is real. She's such a great character that carried the whole story and overshadowed Eskarina as protagonist.
So this book ended up being really good even though the first half wasn't so great. I recommend reading some of Pratchett's later books first before this one but anyway I had an awesome time reading this story (as always that I read one of Pratchett's books) and I'll always be thankful to this great author for creating such an amazing and funny world.
