Fairy godmothers... pumpkins... magic wands... broomsticks... And voodoo women, black cockerels and zombies. It's all happening in Genua, a swampy city famous for it's seafood cuisine. At the moment, it's gearing up for Fat Lunchtime, aka Mardi Gras.

Old Desiderata Hollow has died, leaving behind her cottage in the woods, her large number of travel diaries, her foreign knick-knacks - and her wand. It may always reset to pumpkins, but a fairy godmother's wand is nothing to be sneezed at. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are keen to succeed her, but she has left her wand to Magrat Garlick. An earnest pair of eyes between a body like an ironing-board and hair like a flowery hedgerow in a gale. Magrat is trying to relate to herself through dodgy martial arts and cosmic harmony as peddled by a certain CMOT Dibbler. A bit of a wet hen, but a Good fairy godmother at heart. But everyone knows there are always two fairy godmothers: a Good one and a Bad one...

  Currently Magrat was finding herself through the Path of The Scorpion, which offered cosmic harmony, inner one-ness and the possibility of knocking an attacker's kidneys out through his ears.
She'd sent off for it.

Lady Lilith de Tempscire is the Other fairy godmother. She feels that it doesn't matter what anyone thinks - the story will win in the end. People are powerless in the face of her belief in the all-pervadingness of narrative causality. She bends people around stories, forcing them into Happy Endings, regardless of how they may feel about it [the author is quite emphatic about how much he hates narrative causality]. And she thinks she's the Good one. It's up to Magrat, Granny and Nanny Ogg to travel to Genua to stop her.

Of course, like in most tourist narratives, the actual journey delivers more humorous mayhem than any "adventure" ever could. Gambling (successfully) on riverboats, seriously disrupting some Pamplona-esque bull-running and making the lives of cultivated foreign cooks a nightmare wherever they go are all in a day's recreation for these witches. I just know the author's had some experience of elderly tourists from we-know-where touring places like Spain and France, reducing French cooks to tears with great regularity. Some of Nanny Ogg's comments just made my day.

  'It doesn't sound very funny to me,' said Granny. She turned to glare at the pancakes.
  'At least they can't muck up a decent pancake,' she said. 'What'd they call them here?'
  'Crap suzette, I think,' said Nanny.
  Granny forbore to comment. But she watched with grim satisfaction as the owner finished the dish and gave her a hopeful smile.
  'Oh, now he expects us to eat them,' she said. 'He only goes and sets fire to them, and then he expects us to eat them!'

The Maiden, the Mother and the... other one... have to face their greatest challenge yet. Travelling all the way to Genua in the middle of Fat Lunchtime and a voodoo uprising. There is a swamp cottage that moves around on duck legs, a zombie, a black cockerel more dangerous than Greebo (and alligators aren't more dangerous than Greebo), glass slippers, masked balls, Casanunda the World's Greatest Dwarf Lover, prawn gumbo and banananana dak'ry. Nanny Ogg's in her element. Greebo's trying a new shape on for size. The stroke of midnight must be delayed! Or poor Emberella will have to marry the Prince and live Unhappily Ever After.

  It never seemed possible to people that Jason Ogg, master blacksmith and farrier, was Nanny Ogg's son. [...]
  To his glowing forge were brought the stud stallions, the red-eyed and foam-flecked kings of the horse nation, the soup-plate-hoofed beasts that had kicked lesser men through walls. But Jason Ogg knew the secret of the mystic Horseman's Word, and he would go alone into the forge, politely shut the door, and lead the creature out again after half an hour, newly shod and strangely docile.*

(*Granny Weatherwax had once pressed him about this, and since there are no secrets from a witch, he'd shyly replied, 'Well, ma'am, what happens is, I gets hold of 'un and smacks 'un between the eyes with hammer before 'un knows what's 'appening, and then I whispers in his ear, I sez, "Cross me, you bugger, and I'll have thy goolies on t'anvil, thou knows I can."' )