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Summary
Summary
THE SECOND BOOK IN THE TIFFANY ACHING SERIES
Something is coming after Tiffany. . .
Tiffany Aching is ready to begin her apprenticeship in magic, but life isn't exactly what she thought it would be.
She expects spells and magic - not chores and ill-tempered goats! Surely there must be more to witchcraft than this?
And Tiffany will find that she needs her magic more than ever, to fight off the insidious, disembodied creature that is pursuing her.
This time, neither Mistress Weatherwax (the greatest witch in the world) nor the fierce, six-inch-high Wee Free Men can protect her. In the end, it will take all of Tiffany's inner strength to save herself. Will she succeed?
Author Notes
Terry Pratchett was on born April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, United Kingdom. He left school at the age of 17 to work on his local paper, the Bucks Free Press. While with the Press, he took the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency class. He also worked for the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle. He produced a series of cartoons for the monthly journal, Psychic Researcher, describing the goings-on at the government's fictional paranormal research establishment, Warlock Hall. In 1980, he was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board with responsibility for three nuclear power stations.
His first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. His first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. He became a full-time author in 1987. He wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime including The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Truckers, Diggers, Wings, Dodger, Raising Steam, Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales, and The Shephard's Crown. He was diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007. He was knighted for services to literature in 2009 and received the World Fantasy award for life achievement in 2010. He died on March 12, 2015 at the age of 66.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Terry Pratchett follows up his The Wee Free Men (which PW called "an enthralling and rewarding read" in a starred review) with A Hat Full of Sky, starring the young witch Tiffany Aching. Tiffany leaves home and the little blue Nac Mac Feegle to apprentice for Miss Level. Meanwhile, Tiffany, some powerful witches and the little blue fairies must defeat the hiver that stalks her. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Middle School, High School) In this sequel to The Wee Free Men (rev. 5/03), Pratchett approaches an even more perfect union of domestic and epic fantasy, and the humor similarly races from cerebral to burlesque without dropping a stitch. Gratefully relinquishing her temporary appointment as kelda to the Nac Mac Feegle, Tiffany Aching is apprenticed to Miss Level, a witch of the humbler sort whose singular characteristic is her identity as one person distributed between two bodies: ""My right body is slightly clumsier than my left body, but I have better eyesight in my right pair of eyes. I'm human, just like you, except that there's more of me."" Tiffany's witch lessons with Miss Level, and her encounters with a neighboring teen-queen apprentice, have the kind of magic school humor beloved to fans of Harry P., but they also brilliantly lighten the more serious story of Tiffany's relentless pursuit by a soul-stealing hiver. ""We see you. Now we are you,"" says the hiver as it takes Tiffany over; and all the boisterous force of the Nac Mac Feegle, as well as all the power of Granny Aching's sheep-dappled landscape, the Chalk, will be needed to bring Tiffany back to herself. Pratchett recalls his elders Garner and Mayne in his evocation--and invocation--of the English Chalk, and Tiffany as its personification. ""She tells the hills what they are, every day. She has them in her bones. She holds 'em in her heart,"" says Feegle Rob Anybody, and it's more than poetry, it's the life of this astonishing novel. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 6-10. Incipient witch Tiffany Aching, who confronted danger in The Wee Free Men (2003), faces even greater peril in this equally quirky sequel. She is taken on as an apprentice witch by Miss Level, who is one person with two bodies--an oddity to say the least. Also, Tiffany is stalked and taken over by a hiver, an invisible, brainless entity that commands and distorts the mind of its host, which eventually dies. Luckily Tiffany is strong enough to hide a section of her mind within herself, but she is otherwise completely under the control of the hiver. It's the cantankerous Wee Free Men (or the Nac Mac Feegle) to the rescue, with the help of Miss Level and the wisest, most respected witch of all. The chase is part slapstick, part terror, and in the end, Tiffany herself sets things straight. Pratchett maintains the momentum of the first book, and fans will relish the further adventures of the big wee hag, as Tiffany is known to the Feegles. --Sally Estes Copyright 2004 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-This fantasy continues the story begun in The Wee Free Men (HarperCollins, 2003), in which Tiffany Aching, then age nine, defeated the evil Queen of the Fairies. Now 11, she is beginning her apprenticeship as a witch, as her grandmother was before her. The Wee Free Men have vowed to protect her always. Tiffany's power is untrained and she has accidentally learned how to project herself out of her body or "borrow" herself. This allows a type of demon, a hiver, to take over her mind and destroy it little by little. While she is under its influence, she isn't herself and treats others badly, especially the clique of apprentice witches who have made fun of her. When the Wee Free Men are able to free her, Tiffany banishes the hiver into the next world where Death awaits. With the help of her teacher, who is actually a person with two bodies; wise head witch Granny Weatherwax; an obsessively tidy ghost named Oswald; Toad, a former human lawyer; and Rob Anybody, husband of the current Queen of the Wee Free Men, she learns to find her own magic. This book is full of irreverent humor, laugh-out-loud dialogue, and many memorable characters. A glossary is provided to help decipher the Wee Free Men's Scottish brogue. Fans of the previous book are in for another treat.-Sharon Rawlins, Piscataway Public Library, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Tiffany Aching and her loyal friends, the crazed six-inch Nac Mac Feegle, return in an outing rather less uproarious but more weighty, and thereby possibly more satisfying, than The Wee Free Men (2003). Tiffany, now 11, has left the Chalk to apprentice to a career witch. On the brink of adolescence, she has become more conscious of image, and it is this weakness that leaves her open to attack by a hiver, a parasite that seeks out the powerful, taking over their minds--and killing them in the process. It's the Feegles to the rescue, a highly dubious enterprise. Pratchett weaves a tale that isn't afraid to detour into biting satire or to stop and admire a mot particularly juste, but that keeps returning to the critical question of identity--how an individual must embrace her worst aspects to become her best self, how worth is found in works, not in posturing. The great chalk horse cut into the downlands becomes the metaphor for Tiffany's understanding of this: "Taint what a horse looks like. It's what a horse be." By turns hilarious and achingly beautiful, this be just right. (Fiction. 12+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.