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jheart 's review for:
Wizard's First Rule
by Terry Goodkind
Wizard’s First Rule is, without a doubt, the worst epic fantasy novel that I personally have ever read.
Reasons why Wizard’s First Rule is Terrible, in order of appearance.
1: The Protagonist.
Richard Cypher has three personalities that he shifts between depending on what the story demands: childishly innocent, obstinate dickhead, and tactical genius who understands the culture and mental state of places he has never been and people who he has never seen. These three personalities conflict, when he is innocent he idealistically assumes the best of everyone, when he is a dickhead he is “patient, but not tolerant” (quote direct from the book), and when he is a genius he understands every intricacy of how every person will react to everything. This is true of him from the beginning, and I’m not sure whether he substantially changes by the end. After all when a character has multiple personalities how are you supposed to know?
2: The Writing
A paragraph, in the mind of Terry Goodkind, is written by restating or rephrasing two sentences, three times each, so that they become six sentences. This problem is especially common during dialogue and fight scenes. A common prosaic flow in this book would be: “We shouldn’t go there, if we go there we will die. It would be very bad for us to go there. We should not go there.” Things are not always written this way. But they are written out like that 50% of the time or more. Especially because, unsurprisingly, the paragraphs with repetitive sentences tend to be the longer ones. I wonder why?
3: The Tone/Target Audience
I do not know who this book is for. Like Richard Cypher, it starts childishly innocent, and I was convinced that it was a young adult novel, and the emotions of the characters seem very simple throughout. This isn’t bad if you’re writing a novel for young readers. But no. WFR is graphically sexual and violent, and extremely sexually violent. Villains are not just evil, but ridiculous. An example of this is how Darken Rahl (Yes, this is the antagonist’s name) enchanted all red fruit in a third of the world to be poison, with the absolutely bizarre justification that children like to eat red fruit (???) and he really wants to kill children. His main lieutenant is a child molester, and when they kidnap children to sacrifice for dark rituals he must regularly ask him if he messed it up by “playing with them.” This perfectly encapsulates the NSFL nature of WFR’s depiction of evil. No emotionally mature person would be able to take it seriously, but it is too dark and disturbing for children. So who is it that is meant to endure this? Seriously, who?
4: Eroticized Torture
You did not read that wrong. Out of its 820 page length, WFR contains nearly 100 pages of graphic sexualized torture that are written in such a way to titilate people with the most extreme dubcon dominatrix fetishes, and horrify anyone else. Again, this is in a book that I thought was a young adult novel at first, because of how childish the tone and the protagonist were. The less said about this, the better. (I wish that Goodkind’s editor had told him that)
5: The MacGuffin is stupid. The magic is dumb. The worldbuilding sucks.
With everything else wrong I didn’t realize until near the end how stupid the object that the entire plot is based around is. They are three boxes. If you open one, you destroy the world, if you open another, you destroy yourself, if you open the third, you rule the world...Why? Who tf made this and why would they make it? It’s never explained. Something something wizards of old. Magic just kind of does whatever it needs to. Sometimes it’s based on emotions. Sometimes it’s based on weird mind games that don’t even seem magical. Similarly, there’s literally a map in the front of the book, but I have never had less of a visual sense of where people live in this world or how. There are supposedly three parts of this world that exist completely independently of each other, cut off by magical barriers. The social and economic ramifications of that never really get examined, it mostly serves as a mechanism by which Richard doesn’t know anything.
Other people have complained, at length, about how this book is cliche. I suppose it is. But for the most part, it is deeply stupid in its own little special ways that set it apart. Anyone who thinks that fantasy is “getting worse these days” should read Wizard’s First Rule (not all of it, save yourself) and remember that it was popular in the 90s. If the test of time is really going to be the perfect judge that it should be, this book should no longer be in print.
Reasons why Wizard’s First Rule is Terrible, in order of appearance.
1: The Protagonist.
Richard Cypher has three personalities that he shifts between depending on what the story demands: childishly innocent, obstinate dickhead, and tactical genius who understands the culture and mental state of places he has never been and people who he has never seen. These three personalities conflict, when he is innocent he idealistically assumes the best of everyone, when he is a dickhead he is “patient, but not tolerant” (quote direct from the book), and when he is a genius he understands every intricacy of how every person will react to everything. This is true of him from the beginning, and I’m not sure whether he substantially changes by the end. After all when a character has multiple personalities how are you supposed to know?
2: The Writing
A paragraph, in the mind of Terry Goodkind, is written by restating or rephrasing two sentences, three times each, so that they become six sentences. This problem is especially common during dialogue and fight scenes. A common prosaic flow in this book would be: “We shouldn’t go there, if we go there we will die. It would be very bad for us to go there. We should not go there.” Things are not always written this way. But they are written out like that 50% of the time or more. Especially because, unsurprisingly, the paragraphs with repetitive sentences tend to be the longer ones. I wonder why?
3: The Tone/Target Audience
I do not know who this book is for. Like Richard Cypher, it starts childishly innocent, and I was convinced that it was a young adult novel, and the emotions of the characters seem very simple throughout. This isn’t bad if you’re writing a novel for young readers. But no. WFR is graphically sexual and violent, and extremely sexually violent. Villains are not just evil, but ridiculous. An example of this is how Darken Rahl (Yes, this is the antagonist’s name) enchanted all red fruit in a third of the world to be poison, with the absolutely bizarre justification that children like to eat red fruit (???) and he really wants to kill children. His main lieutenant is a child molester, and when they kidnap children to sacrifice for dark rituals he must regularly ask him if he messed it up by “playing with them.” This perfectly encapsulates the NSFL nature of WFR’s depiction of evil. No emotionally mature person would be able to take it seriously, but it is too dark and disturbing for children. So who is it that is meant to endure this? Seriously, who?
4: Eroticized Torture
You did not read that wrong. Out of its 820 page length, WFR contains nearly 100 pages of graphic sexualized torture that are written in such a way to titilate people with the most extreme dubcon dominatrix fetishes, and horrify anyone else. Again, this is in a book that I thought was a young adult novel at first, because of how childish the tone and the protagonist were. The less said about this, the better. (I wish that Goodkind’s editor had told him that)
5: The MacGuffin is stupid. The magic is dumb. The worldbuilding sucks.
With everything else wrong I didn’t realize until near the end how stupid the object that the entire plot is based around is. They are three boxes. If you open one, you destroy the world, if you open another, you destroy yourself, if you open the third, you rule the world...Why? Who tf made this and why would they make it? It’s never explained. Something something wizards of old. Magic just kind of does whatever it needs to. Sometimes it’s based on emotions. Sometimes it’s based on weird mind games that don’t even seem magical. Similarly, there’s literally a map in the front of the book, but I have never had less of a visual sense of where people live in this world or how. There are supposedly three parts of this world that exist completely independently of each other, cut off by magical barriers. The social and economic ramifications of that never really get examined, it mostly serves as a mechanism by which Richard doesn’t know anything.
Other people have complained, at length, about how this book is cliche. I suppose it is. But for the most part, it is deeply stupid in its own little special ways that set it apart. Anyone who thinks that fantasy is “getting worse these days” should read Wizard’s First Rule (not all of it, save yourself) and remember that it was popular in the 90s. If the test of time is really going to be the perfect judge that it should be, this book should no longer be in print.