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Synopsis:

Geralt the Witcher—revered and hated—is a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary murderer: his targets are the multifarious monsters and vile fiends that ravage the land and attack the innocent.

But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good… and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.

Review:

Andrezej Sapkowski published the first Witcher book The Last Wish in 1993. Since then, he has written eight Witcher books, comics, a video game series (with The Witcher 3 being one of the best games in recent years), a Netflix series that has three seasons, and an animated movie. The property is still expanding and it does not seem to be slowing down. The premise is pretty simple. Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, someone who slays monsters with a combination of fighting training, magical powers, and vials of elixirs. He travels the countryside to slay monsters and solve problems for people for a bounty. He is not respected for the job he does, and many times as soon as his job is finished, he is ran out of the village. 

The overall premise of the Witcher series is pretty simple, but the Witcher series draws people in because of the mix of fantasy, swords and sorcery, action and adventure. The first book, The Last Wish, is a pretty simple introduction to Geralt and the lifestyle that he lives. The book is an anthology of Witcher adventures, each of the stories putting him in different scenarios where he has to use his skills and logic. Up until the last story, Geralt is portrayed as someone a little cold, a person who does not have much interest in getting tangled with the people whom he works for, that the missions are mostly for money and nothing more. He also seems confident and wise in everything that he does. He has enough sense to not get himself into any sort of real trouble, but if he is in trouble he has enough wits to escape. The last story, “The Last Wish”, seems to turn this on it’s head a bit. In this story, he and his bard friend Dandelion are fishing when they pull up a bottle with a djinn inside that quickly hurts Dandelion. Geralt takes him to a village where Yennefer, a powerful witch, is being tolerated. The interactions between Yennefer and Geralt shows a different side of Geralt. Instead of the confident monster slayer, he is exposed as a person bumbling through things and living more on luck than on talent. In this story our perspective on the Witcher changes, and I think this is Sapkowski still trying to figure out who Geralt is.

This definitely reads like a first book in a series, and there is definitely some growth between the first story and the last story. Not only in the writing but in the storytelling. As the book progresses, the stories get better, and you get a sense that The Last Wish includes some of the earlier ideas of what the Witcher will become, and he is figuring it out while he is writing the story. It is not the best book, but it is a book that shows promise in the series getting better.