While I love the humor and the spoof of Phantom of the Opera, there was an overarching theme of fatphobia I couldn't really vibe with.

Agnes is a wonderful new character, I just wish the book treated her better.

Contains one of my all time favorite quotes:

"***the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member, divided by the number mobsters,***"

I think about the truth of that statement on a weekly basis, mostly when I am reading articles on the internet.

2012, March 28-29
That was so much fun.

December 31, 2013 - January 4, 2014
Phantom of the Opera Discworld style.

March 24-26, 2016
I love all of the twists and turns in this story. Brilliant as always.

July 4-5, 2018
Greebo and the witches are awesome.

Me ha gustado muchísimo más de lo que recordaba. Las miles de referencias a óperas, al musical y su surgimiento durante el s XX como entretenimiento de masas, lo cabronas que son Yaya y Tata (no son las buenas, aunque pueda parecerlo porque son las protagonistas), el desarrollo de Agnes, Walter....

Maskerade is another very fun instalment in the Witches series of Discworld novels, which is even more enjoyable if you're a fan of opera and/or musical theatre. In this clear spoof of The Phantom of the Opera a girl from Lancre who would rather not become the third town witch runs off to join the Ankh-Morpork opera company, only to find the opera house is being terrorized by a Ghost. Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax follow her and mystery and hijinks ensue. It's fast-paced and humorous and I could not stop humming tunes from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical to myself as I was reading it.

But - and it's a big BUT - we need to do a better job talking about how so many Discworld novels seem to contain at least one super offensive racist joke. In past I've mostly noted stereotyping of Asian accents and facial features in a way that's very orientalist. In Maskerade there is an outright joke about African American slavery that caricaturizes what Pratchett presumably thought sounded like a slave dialect and compares a cat to a plantation owner.

When you look up discussions of racism and Discworld a lot of the discourse revolves around the fact that as a public figure, Pratchett had a strong history of speaking out against racism. Others look to the way that inter-species conflicts in his novels can be used to illustrate anti-racist principles. That can all be valid at the same time as recognizing that he clearly had some serious blind spots. These kinds of jokes were and are harmful and they aren't limited to his earlier work.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that the racist jokes be cut, since that would be hiding the problem, but maybe future editions could use some kind of footnotes to better contextualize the comments and acknowledge the harm. Regardless, it's clearly something the Discworld fandom still needs to grapple with and that can only start with fans owning it.