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The Wee Free Men (Tiffany Aching, 1) by…
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The Wee Free Men (Tiffany Aching, 1) (original 2003; edition 2006)

by Terry Pratchett (Author)

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10,747258644 (4.2)464
I want to be Tiffany Aching when I grow up.

She is smart, outspoken, and brave with a selfishness that reads more like undying loyalty. In short, she is everything that kid me would have idolized. Did I mention that she wants to be a witch? Or that she's friends with the coolest pictsies around?

I loved this book and highly recommend it to everyone young, old, female, or male and everyone else in between. So, go pick up a copy, lose yourself in the Chalk, and have loads of fun mimicking the voices of the Wee Free Men. ( )
  Nicole_13 | May 12, 2021 |
English (247)  Spanish (2)  German (2)  Italian (1)  Norwegian (1)  Swedish (1)  Dutch (1)  Danish (1)  French (1)  Polish (1)  All languages (258)
Showing 1-25 of 247 (next | show all)
I am unable to express just how much I loved this book! ( )
  wellred2 | Jan 28, 2024 |
I was basically lost the entire time but there were a handful of good quotes or sayings through the book. Read as part of my 2024 reading challenge recommended by Sarah K. ( )
  Moshepit20 | Jan 25, 2024 |
Is there anything better than a smart girl who is not afraid to hit a monster in the face with a frying pan? ( )
  mslibrarynerd | Jan 13, 2024 |
One of my favorite books. I love the Nac Mac Feegle. ( )
  ryantlaferney87 | Dec 8, 2023 |
Tiffany Aching is a 9-year-old from a shepherding family who "sees different" and likely has the talents to become a skilled witch. Among the things she sees are tiny, blue, Scots-speaking men known as Nac Mac Feegles. When her little brother is kidnapped by the Queen of the Fairies, Tiffany enlists the aid of these wee free men to enter Fairyland. Here, Tiffany must use her First Sight and Second Thoughts to avoid being trapped in hyper-realistic dreams. It's a fun and imaginative adventure story.

This is the first of a series of Pratchett's Discworld stories featuring Tiffany Aching, and I surely will be reading the rest. ( )
  Othemts | Nov 14, 2023 |
I really enjoyed this book. I love his logical, no nonsense female characters (it very much appeals to my mathematician side). Although I don't have my own children I have plenty of friends who I am considering buying this book for when their children get to the right age for it. I am looking forward to the other stories in the Tiffany Aching arc. ( )
  Fatula | Sep 25, 2023 |
In the country of Chalk nine year old Tiffany Aching is lying on her stomach gazing into a river as she tickles a trout. Close to her is her sticky little brother Wentworth. Her thoughts are interrupted by the sight of a little man, six inches high, standing up in a little round boat in the river and headed in her direction.

"He had a mass of untidy red hair into which a few feathers and bits of cloth had been woven. He had a red beard, which was pretty much as bad as his hair. The rest of him that wasn’t covered with blue tattoos was covered with a tiny kilt. And he was waving his fist at her and shouting:

'Crivins! Gang awa’ oot o’ here, ye daft wee hinny! ‘Ware the green heid'!”

Startled by this strange sight Tiffany is then aware of a strange shaking of everything around her. Things look blurry, and the water in front of her begins to bubble and turns darker and greener. She steps back from the riverbank just before a green, toothy, long armed monster shoots up out of the water screaming. Tiffany runs to collect her brother. She hustles back to her farm with him.

Puzzled and angered by this experience, back in the farmhouse Tiffany consults the few books on the shelf that her mother calls Granny Aching’s Library. On the shelf are an almanac, a dictionary, Diseases of the Sheep, Flowers of the Chalk, and the one she wants to consult: The Goode Childe’s Booke pf Faerie Tales, “so old that it belonged to an age when there were far more e’s around.” She finds the description that she wants and puts her plan into action. Armed with the largest frying pan in the kitchen, a bag of sweets, her sticky little brother, and the string she always carries in her pocket, they head back to the river.

Staking the bag of candy to the ground close to the riverbank with its top knotted tightly with her string, she sets Wentworth down to work on the knot while she hides behind a bush with the frying pan and waits for the monster to emerge. And when it does:

She ran out from her hiding place with the frying pan swinging like a bat. The screaming monster,
leaping out of the water, met the frying pan with a clang.

It was a good clang, with the oiyoiyoiyioioiooinnnnngggggg that is the mark of a clang well done.

The creature hung there for a moment, a few teeth and bits of green weed splashing into the water, then slid down slowly and sank with some massive bubbles.

The water cleared and was once again the same old river, shallow and icy cold and floored with pebbles.

“Wanna wanna sweeties!” screamed Wentworth, who never noticed anything else in the presence of sweets.

Tiffany undid the string and gave them to him, He ate them far too quickly, as he always did with sweets. She waited until he was sick, then went back home in a thoughtful state of mind.

In the reeds, quite low down small voices whispered:
“Crivens, Wee Bobby, did yer no’ see that?”
“Aye. We’d better offski an’ tell the Big Man we’ve found the hag.”

Thus, begins young Tiffany’s education to being a witch. In Discworld this does not mean attending a school but learning through experience and trial. She does get, for the price of an egg and two carrots, a lesson from Miss Tick a peripatetic Witch who has set up a tent with the other wandering teachers who have come to Tiffany’s village.

"They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words like corrugated iron. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.

People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens."

Miss Tick, who came wearing a square teacher hat as disguise since the local Baron has ordered all witches to be burned, reveals her true identity to Tiffany, and gives her some brief information about witchcraft. The first rule is don’t use magic unless it’s really necessary. It can be unpredictable and difficult to control. Instead, be aware of what’s going on about you, don’t get lost in your own thoughts, be prepared, and trust in yourself. Miss Tick knows Tiffany is on the path to becoming a witch because she saw the monster Jenny Green-Teeth and intuitively knew to use an iron frying pan to defeat it. Iron is an anathema to creatures of Jenny’s sort. In addition to this advice, Miss Tick leaves her familiar, an enchanted talking toad, behind when she leaves town to guide Tiffany in her upcoming challenge.

"Another world is colliding with this one," said the toad. "All the monsters are coming back."
"Why?" said Tiffany.
"There's no one to stop them.
There was silence for a moment.
Then Tiffany said, "There's me."

The toad will not be Tiffany’s only ally. She has impressed the Nac Mac Feegle, the Wee Free Men of the book’s title, a great force of pictsies—no, that’s not a misspelling. They are not pixies; they are pictsies. They dwell in an old burial mound in Chalk. They believe that they are in heaven. What Pratchett does is resurrect the ancient Picts, a people of northern Scotland, so named by the Romans because they covered themselves with blue tattoos and given them a second fictional life in his Discworld a place suffused with both magic and humor. They are six inches tall, covered in blue tattoos and red kilts that I can only imagine Sir Walter Scott would approve of. They speak a broad lowland Scots, and are given to fighting, drinking, stealing, and a fierce hatred of their former tyrant, the Queen of the Faries.
It’s against this wicked Queen and her horrid grimhounds and dromes, creatures that entrap their victims is the worst possible realistic nightmares that Tiffany and the Nac Mac Feegle must contend to save Chalk. ( )
  MaowangVater | Sep 14, 2023 |
A fun frolic through an engaging fantasy world. The characters are all quicker of wit than you or me, even when they are in mortal danger. This is the story of a young witch in the making and how she comes to discover that she is both a witch and a grown up. Her allies in her quest are a band of 'Pictsies' known as Nac Mac Feegle (or Wee Free Men), who will fight and drink nigh anything and speak in a brogue so thick it's often easier to skip past it and rely on the context to understand their meaning. It all comes together for great fun, perhaps even a 5 star read for the right crowd. ( )
  zot79 | Aug 20, 2023 |
3.5*

This late entry in the DiscWorld series is also the start of the Tiffany Aching subseries. Tiffany is a 9-year-old girl who wants to be a witch when she grows up. In this book, she meets the 'wee free men,' also know as Nac Mac Feegles -- a race of 6" tall pictsies who love to fight, steal and drink and can move very, very fast.

I liked the Feegles and Tiffany but this young-adult/children's entry in the series lacked much of the social satire that I love so much in the other DiscWorld books. ( )
  leslie.98 | Jun 27, 2023 |
Thoroughly enjoyable. I listened to the talking book narrated by Steven B. He's so good. I wanted to start this series because the end of it is Shepard's Crown, and I'm keen to learn what happens in it, but I ant to read up to it through the Tiffany Aching series. As a character, Tiffany reminds me a lot of Sarah Seagull: independent, thinks for herself, and has pretty good intuition about people and relationships. I was also pleased to be running into Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax. (I hadn't met Miss Tick before). I especially appreciated his descriptions of Tiffany's (and Grandma Aching's) relationship to the land - the Chalk - as creatures f their native clay, and as shepards not just of their sheep but on the whole biome / landscape. A bit druidic in nature. I also love how Pratchett thinks about witches and witchcraft: it's much less about actual magic and casting spells as it is about changing the way you think about the world, the people in it, and how to handle situations. He give us at least two examples, in how Granny Aching handles the Baron's sheep-killing dog, and how she handles the tinker that beats his donkey. I also love how Granny Aching never says a word about being a witch to anyone, but clearly is taking care of the land and her people all the time with her quiet power.

The Wee Free Men were also delightful - a wonderful culture of rambunctious, argumentative, magical wee men that fight and drink and can do just about anything that needs doing. A perfect vehicle for the Pratchett sense of humor.

Looking forward to reading more in this series. I gave my hard copy of this book to Sophie Wimmer - an 8 year old girl - in the hopes that I can win over one other Pratchett fan in the family. ( )
  jsmick | Apr 9, 2023 |
I am slightly ambivalent towards this. Labelled as a YA Discworld novel, it really didn't feel very much like it was a Discworld book. Set on chalk downs, Tiffany is a pre-teen and the granddaughter of Granny Aching. Granny Aching may, or may not have been, a witch, she was certainly a shepherd.
Into Tiffany's life come the Wee Free Men, a gang of 6 inch high red haired, blue skinned, kilt wearing hooligans, who sound awfully Scottish. They are a bit like bees, in that they have a female Kelda and are all brothers. Into this life comes a Queen, who lives through dreams and uses them to manipulate people into doing what she wants and behaving how she thinks they should. She gives them what they want, not what they need.
It rolls along at a fair old pace, with Tiffany getting into various scrapes that the Wee Free Men help her out of, or make worse, depending on the mood. Into this is interspersed memories of Granny and what she might have done or said.
It's enjoyable enough, but it feels forced, somehow. It also doesn;t feel like a Discworld novel until the very end, when Nanny Ogg & Granny Weatherwax appear, brought in by Miss Tick, to support Tiffany in the battle against the Queen. I've held off reading this for quite some time and I'm not sure that I'm inclined to read more of them. ( )
  Helenliz | Apr 9, 2023 |
260
  freixas | Mar 31, 2023 |
Pratchett, Terry. The Wee Free Men. Doubleday, 2003. Discworld 30.
It should not surprise us that one of the last books Terry Pratchett wrote was The Shepherd’s Crown, a bittersweet story of the young witch Tiffany Aching. Pratchett’s heroes and heroines are people who just put their heads down and get the job done. From The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching story, we know that Tiffany will not be fooled for long by fairy dreams. We should not underestimate her. As she learns from the feegles, the universe is more complicated than it looks from the outside. So is Discworld. 5 stars. ( )
  Tom-e | Mar 3, 2023 |
paperback
  SueJBeard | Feb 14, 2023 |
I heard about the Discworld series for years and read that this was a good place to start. While I liked the story, I wish I'd know that this was a rather simply-written YA novel and seemingly not written for adults. It was still a good, and entertaining, story, just not with one with the level of depth and complexity I was expecting after all the build up of the series I'd heard. Hopefully the other Discworld books are more grown-up and complex. ( )
  tnilsson | Feb 8, 2023 |
Was especially fun to read aloud ( )
  Sue.Gaeta | Jan 10, 2023 |
This book, while YA, has some fantastic adult puns included. The book jacket featured a review from the Oakland Press (Pontiac, MI) which described it as “Monty Python crossed with J.R.R. Tolkien with a dash of Charles Dickens and a pinch of Stephen Spielberg thrown in.” I think this description is fairly accurate.

The word play is amazing, the descriptions are vivid and the storyline flows well. Tiffany is a compelling character even at the age of nine. In search of her baby brother (whom she admittedly doesn’t like), armed only with a frying pan, she uses cunning and logic that far exceeds her years.

Along the way she gets a great deal of help from The Wee Free Men - otherwise known as Nac Mac Feegle. The story alone is a great tale; the puns make it a fabulous read.

It was easy to read, relatively short (263 pages) and thoroughly entertaining throughout. It took me a while to understand the “accent” of the Nac Mac Feegle but once I was hearing it in my head while reading, I had no trouble! ( )
  Dawn.Zimmerer | Jan 9, 2023 |
I liked Tiffany Aching's pragmatism, but found it difficult to remember I was reading about a nine-year-old. Also, I found the Feegles kind of annoying? (But Rob Anybody Feegle is the best name.) Also, also, I found the Fairyworld physics insufficient.

In general, I love Discworld but my favorites are in the Watch sub-series. But I loved the visit from Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. ( )
  wonderlande | Jan 1, 2023 |
This was a re-read, and it's still one of my favorite books ever. It's a hilarious adventure/ fantasy story that is exgremely weird. Perfect! ( )
  kamlibrarian | Dec 23, 2022 |
I have read most of Pratchett's books as they are a favorite escape when the world gets too crazy. I had not read this series yet so started with the Wee Free Men. What a great read. Tiffany takes on the Fairie Queen at 9 armed with a frying pan, a logical mind and the help of the drinking/fighting picties to rescue her brother. It's a great tale infused with Pratchett's characteristic off center worldview.
"That's the trouble with a brain - it thinks more than you sometimes want it to." ( )
  Sbelcher | Nov 13, 2022 |
After enjoying my trip through the City Watch, I figured my next Discworld subseries would be the Tiffany Aching ones, as my wife owns all of them (and they are much beloved by her). But actually, we couldn't find her copy of The Wee Free Men anywhere! It seemed that she had likely loaned it out and never gotten it back. Which was a shame, because she owned the deluxe hardback illustrated edition. I had bought this for her as a Christmas present in 2010; new, it cost me $18. A decade on, it's out of print, and when I bought a replacement, it cost me $40 for a used copy with a torn dust jacket! But it was that or downgrade to a mass market edition.

Anyway, I expected to love this... and I didn't. I liked it a lot at first. Very funny, very real, as Tiffany Aching begins to recognize the strangeness going on around her. Very Pratchett, basically. But somewhere in the middle, as the actual plot began to emerge... I kind of lost interest. I wasn't really sure why I cared about what these people were trying to accomplish. It might not be the book's fault; I read it at a stressful time and in sort of fits and starts between other books, so I don't know that it ever totally sunk in. But yeah, probably the least grabby Discworld I've read so far except for Snuff. Still, when I have a chance, I'll dip back in and keep going. I have enjoyed enough Discworld novels to know to give Pratchett the benefit of the doubt!
  Stevil2001 | Sep 23, 2022 |
I've read Terry Pratchett before and in high school, had attempted Discworld starting with The Color of Magic but hadn't made it very far. I should have researched some more and started with a later series -- because Tiffany Aching is awesome.

I am so very glad my book club picked this to read. I sped through it and am already halfway through Wintersmith, because I couldn't be bothered to stop reading to do something as silly as write a review.

The Mac Nac Feegles are the best supporting characters ever. I loved Tiffany's no-nonsense attitude to life, even in the face of utter ridiculousness.

I'll definitely be reading more Discworld. ( )
  wisemetis | Sep 16, 2022 |
“The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you had no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch.

“If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about “a handsome prince” . . . was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for “a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long” . . . well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told. . . .” ( )
  kenf | Aug 22, 2022 |
Young Tiffany Aching lives on the Chalk, where she makes butter and cheese and minds her annoying little brother Wentworth - until he goes missing, and Tiffany goes after him, armed with a book, a frying pan, a talking toad (formerly a human lawyer), a bit of string, and the help of the Nac Mac Feegle - little red-haired, kilted, blue-tattooed men who love stealing, drinking, and fighting. Their tenacity is useful in Fairyland, where Tiffany must go to get her brother back from the Queen.

See also: Minor Mage by Ursula Vernon

Quotes

The stories didn't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told...(24)

And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done. (28)

Speak up for those who don't have voices, she always said. (29)

...a little world where nothing grew, where no sun shone, and where everything had to come from somewhere else. It was a world that took, and gave nothing back except fear. (149)

"The thing about witchcraft...is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect." (Mistress Weatherwax to Tiffany, 253) ( )
  JennyArch | Jul 13, 2022 |
Highly entertaining with a fun plot and a delightfully sensible main character. ( )
  eri_kars | Jul 10, 2022 |
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