“Soul Music” lets rock and roll loose on the Discworld and plays as broad comedy, built on puns and music references. The jokes work best for readers who catch the allusions, and some find the stretches between them dull. What lifts the book is Susan, Death’s granddaughter, introduced here and much liked, along with the quieter reflections that arrive whenever Death is on the page.

The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.

About the book

Soul Music is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the sixteenth book in the Discworld series, first published in 1994. Like many of Pratchett's novels it introduces an element of modern society into the magical and vaguely late medieval, early modern world of the Discworld, in this case Rock and Roll music and stardom, with near disastrous consequences. It also introduces Susan Sto Helit, daughter of Mort and Ysabell and granddaughter of Death.

Description: Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Reading order · Discworld

Full order & progress →

Where the score comes from

The sources average 7.9 across 596 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 80% of the weight and the score stays at 7.9 — the Humour average of 7.8 barely moves it.