Jeannie is a modern and forward thinking young woman not content with being the only Feegle able to read and write, she insists that Rob and the rest of the men learn. We get to spend time with Jeannie, the new kelda of the clan and wife of Rob Anybody, the rambunctious but well-meaning Big Man. They’re still tiny and angry and drunk, but they are also growing into characters worthy of the consideration given any other main player in the Discworld. I also have to mention the Nac Mac Feegles again here. Granny Weatherwax has never been easier to understand than she is by the end of this novel, in which she barely features. The Hiver isn’t a bad creature, just as Tiffany isn’t a bad person, but it shows that everyone has the potential for bad. Later on, when Tiffany confronts the creature, we discover the Hiver only gives people what it can see in their imaginations, the things they might do if they were pushed far enough. When the creature gets a chance to inhabit Tiffany, it makes her a cruel and manipulative she steals money from an elderly man, turns a shop clerk into a frog and bullies her contemporaries. ‘A Hat Full of Sky’ concerns itself with another monster fighting episode as the plot – the Hiver, which inhabits people’s minds and changes them is much scarier than the Queen from ‘Wee Free’ – but the themes being introduced are very much in the vein of the other Witch novels.Įarly on, Miss Tick tells Tiffany that witches fear ‘going to the bad’, which we all know is Granny Weatherwax’s greatest anxiety, and the Hiver is a neat way to explain this concept to younger readers.

Maybe it was nothing and that’s fine we all write on a learning curve, of course, but it is interesting to consider. Reading this book, I couldn’t help but wonder if Sir Terry ever looked back at some of his earlier Discworld novels and thought about the occasional slips in clarity, especially from the first three books, and what he could have done about them if he had the chance. This direct and no nonsense continuation of the story is another benefit of writing for children, I think where before you may have had ambiguity, here there is no room for such things. Tiffany is an official apprentice witch, travelling away from the Chalk and into the big, wide world she is going to learn her trade from a more senior witch and hopefully eventually be ready to bring it back home.

‘A Hat Full of Sky’ follows on pretty much directly from that first book, in some of the most coherent and clear cut plot continuity that the Discworld has produced so far. You might remember from my ‘ The Wee Free Men’ article that I was raving about Tiffany Aching, the Nac Mac Feegles and the magic of Discworld distilled for kids.

A hatful of sky