And so we meet SusanDeath's granddaughter, hear of the listening monks, and see the development of Music with Rocks In. Susan is probably my favorite Discworld character beside Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching (three-way tie). The complications of the Musicians Guild give this novel a bit of edge, and the Librarian's contraption is a delight. A favorite re-read. ( )

Felt about this pretty much the same way I felt about the previous one – it's got some fun elements, but I'm still not as convinced as I was with Mort... ( )

"Music with rocks in" has arrived at the Discworld. I feel like this book is a lot like Moving Pictures - you'll have the best experience if you like the real world subject matter that the book is based off of. I'll admit I'm not the biggest music follower so I'm sure a lot of it went over my head, but I still enjoyed it. Having also finished Men at Arms recently, I was struck by how cooperative the different races (particularly the dwarf and the troll) were in the band. I wish we had seen more of Susan and Death *and the Death of Rats and Albert) though as I was enjoying this subplot more (probably largely due to the fact that, as already mentioned, I'm just nit that into music).

I loved that we got to see more of the everyday Ankh-Morpork citizens in this book. I am particularly intrigued by the Duckman (who I am convinced looks like one of my first year chemistry lecturers although I have no basis for this - the thought just struck me during a lecture and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind). I also loved that we got to see more of Dibbler again! He really does have a skill for tracking down the next hot thing.

If you love rock and roll and its history and are interested in Pratchett, I suspect that this would be a good place for you to hop in! While there are definitely many familiar faces, it isn't strongly connected to any of the subplots. You'll be thrown into a rather chaotic parody of something you love, filled with terrible puns, strange characters in a stranger world, a mysterious instrument shop that sometimes crosses the street, instruments that may or may not be cursed and bad food courtesy of Dibbler that you should probably avoid. ( )

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett is part of the Death series and can be read as sequel to Mort. In Soul Music, we find DEATH deciding he needs a desperate holiday from the doldrums of cutting life threads across the Discworld. So, it falls to his adopted granddaughter Susan (the daughter of Mort & Ysabell) to fill, however reluctantly, his position. Like her father - who was once Death's apprentice - She’s not really trained nor adept in the task, so things don’t go smoothly but she does get some help from the rat of death and a raven. When she discovers Imp y Celyn, a youthful bard who should have died, and who is being kept alive by a supernatural guitar (which contains the awareness of a primordial music that was responsible for bringing the universe into existence), Susan is not only perplexed but smitten. And with Imp y Celyn's band, the Band with Rocks In, over taking Discworld, it's not easy for her to protect him or set things straight. And it results in Granddaddy Death returning to his gig.

Filled with genuine humor that runs the gamut from slapstick to subtle, plenty of puns, and plenty of jokes about rock music, Soul Music is a truly fun novel from Pratchett.

( )

One of the more routine Discworld novels, I had high hopes for Soul Music due to the prominence of Death, one of Terry Pratchett's most reliable characters, and its chosen topic of rock music. But while there are some good jokes (and some lame puns), I never really knew what the point of it all was. There's no plot to speak of and the Death content doesn't mesh at all with the rock characters until the very end. While the rock-music stuff works better than the motion-picture stuff of Moving Pictures, I still found it quite unwieldy, and the Discworld's mix of cleverness and frazzled chaos continues to draw mixed results for me. The best Discworld novels are those which focus on character, and Soul Music is not one of these. ( )