A Hat Full of Sky

A Hat Full of Sky is a comic fantasy novel by the English writer Terry Pratchett, set on the Discworld and written with younger readers in mind. It takes place two years after The Wee Free Men, and its heroine is Tiffany Aching, who is eleven.

Tiffany leaves her home in the chalk country to serve as apprentice and maid to the elderly witch Miss Level, and her former teacher, the witch Miss Tick, escorts her as far as the town of Twoshirts. At Miss Level's cottage in the mountains she discovers that her new teacher has two bodies, and a spirit named Oswald who cleans the house. She is taken along to a group of apprentice witches her own age, whose leader is an arrogant girl called Annagramma, and what they make of her is not encouraging.

While she and Miss Tick were waiting at Twoshirts, something attacked them for a few seconds: a hiver, which cannot be killed or seen and which takes over a mind. It finds her again at the cottage and takes her body and her mind before she understands what is happening, and the trouble it causes while wearing her is only part of what the book is about. What Tiffany is also learning, from Miss Level and then from the older witch Granny Weatherwax, is what a witch is actually responsible for: the small obligations to the people nearby, and the ground she has been given to look after.