Genre Character of the Week: Tiffany Aching

When you talk about a writer who has books numbering in the dozens it can be tricky to find the character you feel most connected to (especially if he has more than one main character). In the case of Terry Pratchett’s discworld series of novels there are at least half a dozen characters I’m very attached to, but as this is genre character of the week not genre ensemble of the week, I have to pick favourites, and in terms of discworld, my favourite is a girl we met at age nine in the book The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching.

Through four incredible Young Adult novels (being, in order, The Wee Free Men, A Hatful of Sky, Wintersmith, and I Shall Wear Midnight), author Terry Pratchett has created a young girl who is both sympathetic and terrifying. Tiffany begins her journey in pursuit of a missing younger brother, ends up fighting faerie queens and the personification of Winter and eventually ends up featuring in what might be my favourite ending of a fantasy book I’ve ever come across.

At her heart, Tiffany is a young girl from a small rural community who is quite talented at making great cheese (a talent she never downplays, regardless of how formidable her witching prowess becomes), she is very focused on getting things done and has the ability to not just think about things, but to think about the way she thinks about things.

If you’ve never cracked a Discworld novel before, and don’t want to start way back at the beginning (the books are a shared world series, so with some exceptions you can read them in virtually any order) the four books featuring young Miss Aching would be a wonderful place to start exploring the series.