britamac 's review for:

Temple of the Winds by Dick Hill, Terry Goodkind

3.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Terry is losing his touch, the of this book royally pissed me off and if it wasn't my OCD to stop reading a series before the end I would have stopped reading this series already. The end of this book just aggravated me to no end of this world. Richard has once again managed to avoid any consequences of the tragedy introduced during the rising action. I know I am sick for wanting him to suffer the consequences of his actions but at some point his luck has to run out. No one man can keep getting this lucky.

 The only thing that I can see being a redemption is that Richard does kind of sort of suffer a consequences that being the chimes, sadly we don't really see them till the next book. And I guess, if that's the way it has to be, to see Richard pay some sort of consequence for his actions, then I guess that's OK. But, at the same time this does reveal something else, it reveals Terry's heavy-handed writing style that has been previously marred in the previous books. 

So far, the books are kind of getting easier to stomach, not worse like I had been fearing based on Terry's writing. A lot of people have been saying that they are going to get worse but that is their opinion. We will see what happens in the next books. I do know what the last few books are like as I am writing these reviews as all the books are published. But this book wasn't as bad to stomach as it could have been. 

Now this could have been because Richard has evolved a bit to the point that the philosophical arguments the Terry Goodkind is trying to espouse is making sense from Richard's perspective. He has this entire “burdened hero” picture down perfectly which makes it easier to swallow what he's saying I guess. Or maybe I am still a be too naive or jaded I don't know anymore. 

Now I will admit that compared to the last book that I read of Terry's this book is painfully slow, I wanted to throw it across the room so many times because I wanted to be done with it already. The Stone of Tears has so much more action in it. Just makes it so much easier to read. 

Terry creates so many characters that he tends to forget where they all are at times and they don't all get equal time and he doesn't always put them in interesting situations. He is good at creating characters and giving them important roles though that are thought out for certain parts of the story and then sadly fade into the background. We really see this with Verna and Warren later in the series. And it really is a shame because these are two characters that had a lot of potential. Whats even sadder is that some really great characters get less time than the villains get and this is a real shame.