"Wintersmith" by Terry Pratchett

Plot summary: Thirteen-year-old Tiffany Aching accidentally interrupts a ritual dance, causing the Wintersmith (an ancient personification of winter) to get a crush on her. Then everybody has to deal with it.

This isn't one of Discworld's usual intertwined plots; it's actually pretty straightforward. Until the very last one, the Tiffany Aching books seem to always only have one.

Senior Postman Groat (from Going Postal) appears briefly in this when the Wintersmith steals his socks because they're full of sulfur. (This is because of two factors. First, the Wintersmith hears a song about the parts of a human--"iron enough to make a nail" and such--and goes around collecting all the stuff from the verses of the song, some of which is sulfur. Second, Senior Postman Groat has peculiar ideas about how to keep in good health, so he does things like soak his shirts in nitre and saltpeter and fill his socks with sulfur.)

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg from the main Witches subseries show up here as well. They're a lot nicer in this subseries than they are in their own one.

 

There's one character in these, Anagramma Hawkin, who seems to be the stereotypical "alpha girl who doesn't actually know what she's doing but thinks she does and intimidates everyone else into pretending she does". However, she mellows out some during this book, and her idiosyncratic knowledge of magic does come in handy when |fireballing the Wintersmith to make him stop messing with Tiffany|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for strange romance (thank you for existing, Wintersmith) and probably some other stuff as well.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Ach, people're always tellin' us not tae do things," said Rob Anybody. "That's how we ken what's the most interestin' things tae do!"

    Page 37.

    Although Miss Treason had skulls, she did not keep them in the scullery.

    Page 54 (or, since this is the ebook version and the footnotes are on a separate page at the back, Page 241).

    ...the result was a baby boy, who was not a bouncing baby but only because Tiffany caught him; Anagramma didn't know how to hold babies.

    Page 143.

    "According to Chaffinch['s Mythology]," she said, with the Mythology open on her lap, "The god Blind Io created the Cornucopia from a horn of the magical goat Almeg to feed his two children by the Goddess Bisonomy, who was later turned into a shower of oysters by Epidity, God of Things Shaped Like Potatoes, after insulting Resonata, Goddess of Weasels, by throwing a mole at her shadow. It is now the badge of office of the summer goddess."

    Page 162. The Discworld pantheon is like ancient mythological pantheons taken to the extreme, and when it shows up it's hilarious.

(Endnote: Except for the first book |and the last one|, the Tiffany Aching books all have their own unique villains that don't actually show up anywhere outside of her subseries.)