“Wintersmith” sets a growing-up story inside an old myth, and its best pages belong to the community of witches around Tiffany. Aimed at younger readers, it keeps the familiar Discworld humour and a soothing, almost nonsensical logic. Some find it less funny than expected, feel it runs out of energy along the way, and are uneasy at times with how it treats a girl’s passage into adolescence. Third of the Tiffany Aching books.

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

Wintersmith is a comic fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, set in the Discworld and written with younger readers in mind. It is labelled a "Story of Discworld" to indicate its status as children's or young adult fiction, unlike most of the books in the Discworld series. Published on 21 September 2006, it is the third novel in the series to feature the character of Tiffany Aching. It received recognition as a 2007 Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association.

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Reading order · Discworld

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Where the score comes from

The sources average 8.3 across 327 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 69% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Young adult average of 7.8. That is how 8.2 comes out.

Source	Average	Ratings	Weight
Open Library	8.1	29	9%
Hardcover	8.3	298	91%

Frequently asked

What age is Wintersmith for?

Wintersmith sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 368 pages — shorter than 85% of the ranked books in Young adult.