I loved The Witcher series, and decided to read the book on which it was partially based - The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski.
My friends in Ukraine and Russia were going crazy about Witcher ten years ago, but somehow I missed that party. High time to catch up.
After the series I knew the general idea of the story, but the book and the show are different: some stories didn’t make it to the screen, while others that were not in the book appeared. I would call it a very loose adaptation.
Going back to the book. A few stories are retellings of famous fairy-tales, like Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, while others portray various parts of the Witcher world, his story, and his character. They are charged with a great deal of action with little explanation of the world-building itself. The characters constantly refer to this or that event, place, or person, use this weird word or that, but there is never any story behind those words. In this regard I felt cheated. There wasn’t much character development either.
On this unfavorable background the series stand out impressively. This is probably the first time that I enjoyed the film better than the book. I still hope that the Last Wish is so underwhelming because it was written as a prequel to the original series that start with Blood of Elves. I still have some expectations there.