The hefty page count and number of stories make it a bit hard to sustain momentum in one sitting, but as a book to be dipped into at intervals, this is highly enjoyable fare. Beech’s lively, casual monochromatic art has a Quentin Blake-esque flair, and the pop-eyed figures and their goofy posturing complement the droll text. Wizards, dragons, royalty, Romans, explorers, villagers, taxi drivers, cavemen, and the odd abominable snowman make appearances (as do warriors unfortunately wearing “war paint and feathers”), and the narratives are by turns fantasy escapade (as in “The 59A Bus Goes Back in Time”), adventure story (“Another Tale of the Carpet People”), or meditations on the absurd (“The Great Egg-Dancing Championship”). The novel concludes the story arc of Tiffany Aching.
Although the stories, as a whole, are not as richly constructed as Pratchett’s later novel-length works, it’s clear that even as a youngster he had an excellent ear for a pithy turn of phrase (“The donkey, whose name was Pigsqueak, passed the time by singing comic songs in what wasn’t a bad singing voice for a donkey”) and a funny line of dialogue, as well as a knack for introducing creative plot twists. Terry Pratchetts final novel, The Shepherds Crown, was published months after his death in 2015. These fourteen stories for children that Pratchett wrote in his teens, as a junior reporter for a local newspaper, have been anthologized here with “the odd tweak here, a pinch there, and a little note at the bottom where needed.” The fourteen short tales vary in length and in their characters and setting (although several share the fictional town of Blackbury as their setting, and two stories feature “the Carpet people,” who later got their own novel, The Carpet People, BCCB 12/13), but all share Pratchett’s signature brand of humor.
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