Wintersmith

You know that feeling you get with the first sparkling snowfall of the year? When you look up and see a magical swirl of snowflakes coming down, each one different from the other? And then you look more closely and realize they're not unique but identical—all of them tiny twinkling likenesses of you?

Um.

Maybe you don't. But Tiffany Aching does.

Tiffany, as fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series know, is a witch. She has long dark hair and the mastery of magic, but beyond that she's not especially witchy. She's only 12 going on 13, for one thing, and she's still learning the trade. She also doesn't like wearing all black; blue and green, the colors of a clear summer day, are the ones she favors. The witch to whom she is apprenticed, however, is old-school. All of Miss Treason's clothes are black, as is everything in the little cottage they share. So much so, Pratchett tells us in one of many laugh-out-loud moments, that if you dropped a stick of licorice you'd never find it again.

But even Miss Treason's uberwitch persona isn't what it looks like at first. It's mostly Boffo, you see. You know, Boffo. It's kind of like confidence, or the ability to see the magic in the everyday, or a certain sly way of building your own reputation. Because the truth is, witches aren't especially scary. They're mostly like everybody else. In his latest witty bit of spoofery, Pratchett uses his witches' similarity to people as we know them to make interesting insights, both satirical and sincere. "Magic is mostly movin' stuff around," one elder witch tells Tiffany matter-of-factly, calling to mind Woody Allen's mostly-serious "80 percent of life is showing up." He has a certain sensitivity to the weirdness of being a girl on the verge of teenage-ness, too. "He'd come back," Tiffany thinks to herself, when the Wintersmith, who has already made the snowflakes look like her, tries to woo her again by writing her name over and over in the frost on the windowpanes. "That was dreadful! But also, just a bit ... cool."

Oh, about that. Miss Treason took Tiffany to the annual dance that brings in the winter, and against all good judgment the girl leapt up and danced with the Wintersmith, the maker of winter. (Hee.) The Wintersmith was taken aback at this. No human, or witch even, had ever been so unafraid of him, and soon his taken-aback became taken-with: he fell in love with Tiffany. Hence the snowflakes. His attention is a bit misguided, though. After all, he's not really a he. He's *winter itself*, which makes him more like an it. As one witch explains, he's an elemental, and they're pretty simple. He seems to have mistaken Tiffany for Summer (the female elemental who brings about that season) and he wants to marry her, but he's only just learning how complex emotion and affection are to human beings. And actually, so is Tiffany.

Pratchett's dry humor and sense of the absurd are wonderful. He gets some delightful wordplay in there—"get out of my face," Tiffany tells Miss Treason, who is blind but can see through other people's eyes by, well, climbing inside their faces and peering out. "Cackling" is another piece of genius: it's not just the word for the laugh that witches make, but for their propensity for cracking under the pressures of witch life and going batty. He pokes gentle fun at academics and self-serious new-agers and makes wry commentary on the difficulty artists have in supporting themselves. But his fine intelligence really comes through in his heady but not heavy-handed ideas about what it means to be human, about life and death, about identity, and about how Boffo is really just a good way of looking at things -- how if you know your own worth, "every stick is a wand, every puddle a crystal ball." Pratchett's insights prove that fantasy is a place where the deep truths about life can bloom expectedly.

However many good things you can say about fantasy stories, I'd like to make a case for there being at least one not-so-good one. In a world where everything is a whimsical version of our own, real world, there are lots of places to hide. If, for instance, you had a few smirky comments to make about women's interactions with each other, you could say "witch" instead of "woman," and nobody could accuse you of being anything less than kind.

Nonetheless, this novel, and Pratchett as a writer, have so much to recommend them that this never becomes much of a problem. It's hard to find fault, in the end, with a writer whose characters "welcome the winter because of the new summer deep inside it," and whose heroine is called to be "a summer in winter until winter ends."