Why I always gotta review these five-star Terry Pratchett books???
Unlike with a lot of Pratchett books I give five stars to, I can’t really justify this one with much of a deeper meaning. I just had a really good time with it, and the premise and main character really tickled me. Our “hero” is Moist Von Lipwig, a con man and thief who starts the novel being hanged for his crimes. He manages to survive the hanging, and the tyrannical Lord Vetinari offers him a choice, be hanged again, or revive the basically dead Post Office. Surprise, Moist, you are now the Postmaster.
The Post Office is a mess. Letters fill the huge structure from top to bottom, and because it’s Discworld, that many letters all together in one place for such a long time (decades!) are making things go funny. The last four Postmasters have ended up dead. There’s a THING in the basement.
So Moist, a career criminal and inveterate runner-awayer, now is a public servant and he finds himself . . . liking it?
This was one of the funnier Discworld books for me, and I liked the satire of government institutions and corporate greed (here in the form of the Clacks, which as been taken over by a heartless and unscrupulous man named Reacher Gilt, a truly great name). And of course, Moist is a showman, so he can’t just revive the Post Office, he has to make a spectacle of it while doing so. It was very entertaining.
Chipping Away at Mt. TBR, July 2022—Book 9/31