I had wanted to love the book saga. I truly do. I love the three prequels, especially Season of Storms. I can tolerate the first two books, trying to reason that it’s a "world-building stage" serving the same role as the first three Harry Potter books. The third book is a bit more enjoyable, save for the pointless, long Ciri in the desert chapter in the middle. But the fourth book really soured me. I came into the fifth book hoping that it would get better.

Unlike many readers, I actually already know the plot of the final book through some intentional research. I know the kind of ending that it offers. I personally don't mind the tragic ending because, despite the author’s insistence that the game isn't canon, I treat it as such, and therefore, many of the tragic ending is actually undone in the game. 

What sours me is not the plot per se but the way the plot is delivered. It seems to me that throughout the five books, Sapkowski is trying different writing styles to see what sticks. That doesn't do it for me. My major criticism for the second book is related to how the author jumps not just from the perspective of one character to another but also jumps from one timeframe to another without much indication to the readers. This book only makes it worse by jumping the universe on a whim.

I decided to cut my losses at 26% in the middle of Chapter Four. Thanks to ChatGPT and various internet sources, I pretty much already know what I need to know regarding the plot. I believe the rest are fillers and details that I will probably forget once I get to my next book anyway. 

Like all the other books in the Witcher series, this one jumps back and forth between perspectives, and gives a lot of information that isn’t completely necessary or interesting. The writing style is descriptive but not necessarily excessively so. The story itself has a lot of twists and turns and mysteries. I’d say the ending was rather bittersweet. Also, there were a lot of things that didn’t really make too much sense for the characters that have developed over the past handful of books. There were also just a handful of times whenever an action was starting to peak, and then it just dropped down because there was some kind of intervention that just happened to happen at that moment.

I didn’t necessarily expect a happy ending for everyone… But at least an ending that actually had conclusions that really mattered or that made sense would’ve been nice. 

Overall, I rather enjoyed the series, despite its many flaws. With the switching perspectives, it did get confusing as to what was going on and what character was doing what. It often went to characters that I wasn’t really sure why they were even included… Unless they were just trying to close up plot lines? I don’t know; they didn’t really matter. It didn’t really seem very important that So-and-So died in such a way or succeeded in XYZ. Sure, sometimes it was nice to see what older characters that we hadn’t seen in a while were doing… But overall it wasn’t really important to the plot what was going on in their lives. 

The reader for this audiobook is very talented! He really knows how to manipulate his voice to the different characters and stick with it consistently. The voice acting  was also very good with emphasized emotions relevant to the scenes.

I’m really interested in seeing how the series on Netflix adapts all of the storylines. Hopefully it’s a little bit less convoluted…