This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today I would like to recommend a high fantasy series, which has gained in popularity and produced many more readers in the past several months. When a prominent streaming service makes a big budget, series based off of a series of books and then spends hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing, you had better bet that it will create interest in the original source material. This is what has happened with Andrzej Sapkowoski’s The Witcher Saga.
Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski began writing his saga in short story form in the early 1990s which brought the character of Geralt of Rivia to the world. From there the shorts stories became a full series of novels. The novels created an almost cult following in Eastern Europe and later in the United States when the character was put into a highly successful video game and graphic novels.
The Saga follows the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia. He is A Witcher, a notorious being who travels the Continent to make a living hunting monsters that plague the land. He is basically a sword for hire, but along with that sword comes his supernatural powers of speed, strength, tactics, and sorcery. He constantly makes claims that he goes where the money goes, but it doesn’t take long to realize that Geralt has a moral compass that at times are at odds with his profession.
The series of books is high fantasy of magic, sorcerers, deadly creatures, and epic scope. An underlying theme of the series is that “not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good... and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.”
Contact the Sioux City Public Library and see how you can begin your journey in this very popular series.
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