Equal Rites (Discworld #3, Witches #1) by Terry Pratchett

Format: Audio (Audible)
Read: July 2025

This was another re-read! I first read it on a particularly traumatic holiday in 2014 (which is how it made my books I read to escape list), and I enjoyed it! I decided to re-read all the Witches books because I now have an Audible subscription, and I thought they’d make great audiobooks!

They do make fantastic audiobooks, but the major drawback is that reading that way means I can’t highlight all the many brilliant things that Granny Weatherwax says and thinks, which make me laugh!

This book, the third in the Discworld series but the first in the Witches series within the series, pokes fun at the apparently arbitrary fantasy conventions that divide the titles given to magical practitioners by sex. Wizards are men, Witches are women. You can’t have a female Wizard, and definitely not a male Witch. Why not? Because that’s why!

Things get complicated when the eighth son of an eighth son turns out to be a daughter and is mistakenly given the staff of a dying wizard. At first, the town witch Granny Weatherwax attempts to train her to be a perfectly normal witch, but soon realises that isn’t going to work, and reluctantly forms a plan to get the young and unruly Esk into the Unseen University where she can learn to control her wizard magic.

I love Granny. She is a brilliant character! The definition of no-nonsense, she’s fiercely practical, supremely confident, does not suffer fools and has an uncanny knack of never being wrong (even when she is). She has the bite of an impatient person, yet is admirably patient in her treatment of the eight-year-old Esk, and understands that she must make her own mistakes if she is ever to learn (as evidenced by the bird incident).

Esk however is a child character, very precocious, and therefore a bit annoying! I do wish she’d been a bit older but the story did require a lot of  guileless naivety to work!

So much in this book made me laugh. I absolutely love the concept of Headology and the necessity of a witch’s hat. Every time I heard Cutangle’s name, it cracked me up!

I can’t wait to (re)read more Witches!

Quotes

That’s one form of magic, of course.”
“What, just knowing things?”
“Knowing things that other people don’t know.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

Like the hurried lover, it comes and goes.

Million-to-one chances…crop up nine times out of ten.