Book Review

  

The following is a Book review of the first two books in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series submitted by my lovely Wife who goes by Lakait in these parts. you may remember her from the Battle of Windle's tower series

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I recently listened to audio versions of the first two books in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. In my Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of every book I own or borrow from the library, I've classified these novels as Fantasy Adventure. The books are:

Title: Published

Wizard's First Rule: 1994

Stone Of Tears: 1995

I was impressed with Wizard's First Rule, though it was frustrating that I kept being wrong about my plot line predictions. I think it was refreshing for RGH, seeing as how he is used to me being right a good 90% of the time, which usually resulting in him shaking his head at me. I rated the book as Excellent, which is the equivalent to 5 of 5 stars. Then I eagerly moved on to Stone of Tears.

This one was no where near the quality of the previous book. I went from being excited about the series to completely frustrated. We only made it about half way through the book and mostly that was because of RGH. I was ready to shoot the author after a couple of chapters. I've never seen such artificial plot development. It's understandable that a character, even a protagonist, even one the read likes, might make stupid mistakes. Everyone does so from time to time. But to have the main characters make so many dumb ass moves that it leaves the reader wondering how they managed to survive the previous book...well, there I draw the line. The impression I have is that Terry couldn't think of a way to continue the story without forcing Richard, Kaylin, Zed, and even Addy to create a horrible mess that they would then need to clean up. This is no way to run a plot, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, it seems that we will never get any deeper into these stories, because I can't imagine skipping to Book 3. And frankly, I wouldn't want to. There are still some very cool characters that haven't been tainted, like Chase and Rachael, but I don't think I can put up with Terry's B.S. just for them.

Well there you have it...

RGH