"Blood of Elves" by Andrzej Sapkowski

I really, really enjoyed this book— but it’s impossible to recommend on its own. I was incorrectly drawn in to this as a starting point for the Witcher series, having not done my research, and it was very quickly clear to me past the opening chapter that this was intended for people intimately familiar with the short story collection.

For me, that was not an issue— I had enough familiarity with the lore through the game series— and I opted to continue reading regardless of having skipped the previous two short story collections. But for anyone who is less familiar with the series, its characters, and world, this is a horrible starting point more likely to put you off of the series entirely than to entice you to seek out the prerequisite material. I only highlight this complaint so thoroughly because, both here on Goodreads and at the bookstore, it was labeled as the first Witcher novel. Which is correct! It is the first Witcher novel, but that is a misleading statement as it is built heavily upon the world and characters established in the short story collections.

This is a slow book and I greatly enjoyed it for that quality. It takes its time within this familiar world and characters to slowly set up an overarching conflict and narrative which I assume spans the rest of the books, while still having enjoyable character growth and character moments. In terms of plot, surprisingly little happens in this book— it spends the majority of its time highlighting Ciri’s growth and building up the world, its players, and its conflicts— but that wasn’t something I really noticed until thinking about it afterwards. It does an exceptional job of making the world feel complex and dangerous, with our characters being small pieces in the ongoing conflicts around them.