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A review by sarina_langer
The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind
3.0
The Omen Machine begins a new plot line after the last one finished in Confessor, and it comes with some creepy new crawlers to boot! There's something unsettling about the idea of shadows watching you sleep and potentially tearing you to shreds at any given moment.
As the blurb above states, a machine is unearthed (literally, it was hidden and buried pretty well) which spits out omens. Unlike the prophecies which have been a big part of the previous books, these omens are very specific and come true within a short period of time. The most interesting factor for me was that the machine seems to be alive, in a sense, and is replying directly to Richard which implies that maybe the machine is more than a, well, machine. Not all questions were answered in this book and I'm dying to find out more in the next book. Dying, I tell you!!
The plot I loved, and the possibilities for the next book in the series have me excited to start reading, but I felt like the writing itself had taken a step back, as had the characters themselves. Has Zedd - or any of them, for that matter - always been so slow to grasp simple concepts? Why do we need to spend several pages discussing the obvious? Why did Richard have to explain to Zedd how a Confessor's power works? The man knows! Maker, he's known for longer than Richard but for some reason it had to be explained to him. So I don't know what happened but the characters were smarter before. I'm sure they were. There were also some unnecessary repetitions, but overall there were so few that it didn't ruin anything too much. It just put a damper on things here and there.
Don't get me wrong, though, it was a good book with a great plot and I'm not about to stop reading my way through this series now. It was a great read which I devoured, but it does feel like he could have done better and has done better in the past.
Then again, the man has written 17 books in this series. They can't all be as awesome as the first, and given that this is only the second I had any issues with I can't really complain. Even with its faults it was still amazing.
As the blurb above states, a machine is unearthed (literally, it was hidden and buried pretty well) which spits out omens. Unlike the prophecies which have been a big part of the previous books, these omens are very specific and come true within a short period of time. The most interesting factor for me was that the machine seems to be alive, in a sense, and is replying directly to Richard which implies that maybe the machine is more than a, well, machine. Not all questions were answered in this book and I'm dying to find out more in the next book. Dying, I tell you!!
The plot I loved, and the possibilities for the next book in the series have me excited to start reading, but I felt like the writing itself had taken a step back, as had the characters themselves. Has Zedd - or any of them, for that matter - always been so slow to grasp simple concepts? Why do we need to spend several pages discussing the obvious? Why did Richard have to explain to Zedd how a Confessor's power works? The man knows! Maker, he's known for longer than Richard but for some reason it had to be explained to him. So I don't know what happened but the characters were smarter before. I'm sure they were. There were also some unnecessary repetitions, but overall there were so few that it didn't ruin anything too much. It just put a damper on things here and there.
Don't get me wrong, though, it was a good book with a great plot and I'm not about to stop reading my way through this series now. It was a great read which I devoured, but it does feel like he could have done better and has done better in the past.
Then again, the man has written 17 books in this series. They can't all be as awesome as the first, and given that this is only the second I had any issues with I can't really complain. Even with its faults it was still amazing.