Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In Djelibeybi, not much has changed…in thousands of years. But all it takes is one king with wild ideas about such nonsense as “indoor plumbing” and “mattresses”–and one seriously large pyramid–for the kingdom to get forced into the modern day.
This story jumps around a bit, but generally follows Teppic, the prince of Djelibeybi (which is totally-not-Egypt). What with the kingdom being rather in debt, someone has to earn a living, so he goes of to Ankh-Morpork to learn an honest living as an assassin. Meanwhile, his father has a bit of an existential crisis about being the god-king responsible for sunrises…without knowing how he does it every day. His realization that gravity does indeed apply to him sets Teppic on a path back home to discover his own godhood and to begin the wrestling of his country into time with the rest of the world. There is then a lot of quantum mechanics and fooling around with far-too-large pyramidal magics, and then there’s a mess that not even Dios, high priest for as long as anyone can remember, knows how to handle.
This story was a lot of fun, as all Pratchett books are, but it didn’t quite captivate me as some of his others. It was a good time filler but nothing exemplary. It jumped between main characters more often, or rather, seemed to, and so it was a little hard to follow at first. Of course, everything came together and made perfect sense in the end, right down to the silly naming of the two royal embalmers. Pratchett, as always, had a plan.
M.E. Kinkade 