A review by castaya
Severed Souls by Terry Goodkind

3.0

I'm not entirely sure how to rate this book. I was so confused and disappointed by the end of it. Richard is dead (we knew this going in) which saddens me greatly, but I feel like I wasted all kinds of time reading the story leading up to his death. Zedd gets murdered early on, but instead of the heart-wrenching end this character deserves, Goodkind brushes it off like it's nothing. Ouch. He then went to great lengths to explain what the villains were trying to accomplish and a little bit of the reasons why, but their importance is actually very minimal in the grand scheme of things. Hannis Arc marches off to take the People's Palace and that's the last we see of him. WHAT?!? Why bother putting the character in at all? Emperor Sulachan comes back from the dead leading an army of undead slaves... to nothing. I was willing to get past his use of zombies in this story arc simply because he did such a good job of tying them into the world, but they really seemed to have no purpose. Ludwig Dreier was a really well-developed character, and I thought he was awesome, but then he was captured and killed before really accomplishing anything. Oh, and there's some kind of mysterious occult power that comes out of nowhere and never really gets explained but somehow manages to fuck up any chance for the characters to actually do anything in the story. And did you notice how I made no mention of that previously all-important Omen Machine? Yeah, Goodkind really doesn't either. So basically, Richard and Kahlan are sick, Kahlan gets stabbed, Richard uses said sickness to reach into the world of the dead and bring Kahlan back, sacrificing himself in the process. And... CURTAIN. I read 92 chapters for that? Nothing else in the story really seems to matter anymore. It's like Goodkind just wrote in a bunch of extra stuff to fill the pages. I've always loved his books for the fact that they weren't just about making you want to know what would happen next. Any challenge the characters faced had a purpose besides just driving forth the plot - it helped the characters (and subsequently the readers) learn something about themselves or about Goodkind's world (which was always a mirror of our own) and made for a truly enjoyable read. Goodkind seems to have forgotten that and has opted for the uninteresting page-turner with pointless characters and plot twists, and an extremely unsatisfying ending.