Every hour is witching hour for this witch
First, some backstory:
Tiffany Aching lives in a village on a continent in a world that is sort of like ours, but not. This would be the Discworld, where the witches are clever, the wizards are pompous, and the most powerful warriors are tiny blue men with thick Scottish accents. Stepping on a Nac Mac Feegle is akin to stepping on a brick - it won't hurt the Feegle, but the same could not be said for you. And young Tiffany, a witch of the Chalk, has earned the undying loyalty of the Feegle clan ever since she defeated the Queen of the Fairies with a frying pan. When she was nine.
As you can see, Tiffany has tremendous strength. For the past six years, she has gone from a witch-in-training to a full-time witch, a job that mostly entails being a nursemaid for the sick and a caretaker of the old and generally doing the things no one else wants to do - but need to be done anyway. For the most part, this doesn't require magic, or at least not the flashy kind of magic as seen in other fantasy novels. Blessed with First Sight (the ability to see the true reality, instead of the reality you only wish to see) and Second Thoughts (an acute sense of self), Tiffany has battled not only fairy queens but an invisible predatory hive and the personification of Winter. In this final volume, she faces her greatest adversary yet: a spirit made of pure malice, with the ability to spread hatred of witches amongst people. And right now, the target of its hate is directed at Tiffany.
Right away, a reader is alerted to the difference in tone of this book. Earlier volumes have opened with scenes of young Tiffany and her brother playing by a creek, or Tiffany gifting a kitten to her mentor. In the second chapter here, we open with the aftermath of physical abuse in a family - a thick-headed and angry father has punished his young daughter for getting pregnant. As the local witch, Tiffany must confront the father while also prevent a growing mob from taking the law into their own hands. She cannot let her fellow villagers become murderers, but she also must convince the father that it is in his best interest to be penatent and humble. He is resistant: "Slip of a girl like you, pokin' about in other people's business ... What are you going to do when the [mob] comes for you?" What he doesn't know is that being a witch is about pokin' about in people's business, especially if everyone else is too afraid to do it.
Of course, this also sets in motion one of the main themes of the book: Tiffany's isolation from everyone in her community. Being the first official witch the Chalk has ever seen, the fact that Tiffany is not evil - like those storybooks always say - confuses people a little. The only person who can truly understand a witch is another witch, but all of Tiffany's peers have left. Making matters even more heartbreaking, Roland, the only boy Tiffany has ever liked (even if she is too proud to admit it outright) is getting married to the daughter of a duchess. Even the Nac Mac Feegle, who have stuck by her - literally, as they follow her everywhere she goes - are not as huge a presence in this book. The message is clear: Tiffany is growing up, and as her world widens, it threatens to surround her with lonliness.
But before long, another theme slowly begins to crop up: there are plenty of surprises in store, and not all of them bad. Tiffany finds allies in the most unlikely of places: Preston, a remarkably smart young guard that works in the Baron's castle; Letitia, the bride-to-be who may have something in common with Tiffany besides their feelings for Roland; and a couple of witches Tiffany finds in the spiraling, hilariously-named city of Ankh-Morpork. The support Tiffany receives from all of them helps when Roland, blinded with frustration and grief from his father's death, nearly orders his guards to destroy the Feegle clan's home and locks Tiffany in jail. However, she is able to use this to her advantage, with the assistance of the amiable Preston.
One of the great marks of a Terry Pratchett novel is the different levels of humor he employs to endear the characters, the setting, or even a quiet moment in the book to the reader. There's the running joke of a Feegle running up a man's pants to inflict terrible amounts of pain. There's a passage that beautifully tells us all we need to know about how Tiffany feels about Letitia: "Here was a person whose mere existence had led Tiffany, one evening, to wonder about that whole business of sticking pins into a wax figure. She hadn't actually done it, because it was something that you shouldn't do, something that witches greatly frowned on, and because it was cruel and dangerous, and above all because she hadn't been able to find any pins." There's the Ankh-Morpork song: "Ankh-Morpork! It's a wonderful town!/The trolls are up and the dwarfs are down!/Slightly better than living in a hole in the ground!" These jokes - and many more - are treats in themselves, added to the story without distracting readers from the heavier dramatic elements.
I found this book somewhat atypical due to the pace of plotting. Unlike some - though not all - of Pratchett's other books, here the climax is spread out among the second half of Midnight, instead of relegated to the last couple chapters. The result is that the emphasis is not placed so much on the battle between Tiffany and the evil spirit, but rather the realization Tiffany has about what, exactly, she is defeating and how she hardens herself against it. "No mercy," she promises herself. "No redemption." She fills herself up with pride, learns to live with fear (because, yes, even a witch can fear), and trusts her instincts, which tend to kick in at the last minute. But when everything comes together, you get the feeling that Tiffany, as unsure as she may seem, has been preparing for this battle for the last six years.
Fans of this series will be saddened to know that this is the end of Tiffany's story. As Pratchett's loyal readers know, he has been suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease for the past three years. Although he is showing signs of taking it easy, so far he refuses to stop writing entirely, which is a blessing. In any case, he has given the readers of Midnight a passage that shows us a glimpse of Tiffany's future, ending the four-novel-long story on a gentle, sweet note. For those of you who have not heard of the Discworld series, I'd highly recommend Maurice and his Educated Rodents - based loosely on the tale of the Pied Piper - and, naturally, The Wee Free Men - the first Tiffany Aching novel. In fact, I'd pretty much recommend the other 35 or so Discworld books - you really can't go wrong.