Soul Music by Terry Pratchett is the first Discworld book about Susan Sto Helit. [My reviews of the other Discworld novels here.]

Plot:
Death has one of his episodes again and left his post, which means that his granddaughter Susan has to take over his job without really knowing what she’s doing. In the meantime the young musician Imp Y Celin comes to Ankh Morpork. When he meets up with the dwarf Glod and the troll Cliff, they start playing a new kind of music – Music with Rocks In. And with that they start events much bigger than they thought at first.

Soul Music was a good, entertaining read. But I mostly just don’t connect with Pratchett in the right way, and this book is no exception.

My problem with all those Pratchett books is this (except for a few notable exceptions): I see the fun, I appreciate his jokes on an intellectual level but he hardly ever makes me actually laugh. Which is weird and kinda sad. [But what did make me laugh in this one was “Buddy Holly”. That was damn awesome.]

I thought the Death storyline was a little old. It’s always him going off on a mission to find his humanity or to forget his deathness and it’s always the same thing. But I did enjoy Susan – she’s a really cool character. And her relationship with Death was wonderful.

Though I enjoyed the Wizards even more than her. Ridcully might be my second favorite character (after Sam Vimes) in all of the books and the Dean was absolutely brilliant.

Summarising: Pratchett is an entertaining writer and I’ll keep reading the Discworld books, but I’ll never by their biggest fan.

Here my favorite quotes:

Deafness doesn’t prevent composers hearing the music. It prevents them hearing the distractions.

It was sad music. But it waved the sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could but you were still alive.