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A review by eighthsamurai
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
1.0
I wanted to give this book a try because when I was young, I read the Scions of Shannara and remember being quite fond of it. It's the 4th Shannara book. After reading The Sword of Shannara, I've come to the conclusion that either Terry Brooks got much, much better at writing, or more likely, I was one DUMB kid. I hadn't read LOTR at that point either.
I saw all of the Lord of the Rings rip-off criticisms before I started and decided to give it a go anyway as it's an accusation that gets thrown at a lot of fantasy books, simply because LOTR is the pinnacle. However, I was totally unprepared for just how shockingly plagiarised it was. I thought it might be the abstract sense of the world or the vague plot. Not so - characters, action scenes, plot points, politics, it's all been stolen. You would think that coming some time after LOTR, the author would at least improve on the original. Nope. This is as poor as it gets.
Here is a list of things I really didn't like:
- The backstory alluding to an interesting deviation from the LOTR world building is left behind after just one chapter - it was the only original and intriguing aspect of the whole book and it was left unexplored and therefore a clunky, and ultimately unnecessary, add-on.
- There are clumsy plot holes littered throughout but especially at the start of the book. At one point characters know about things they simply have no way of knowing. It's a minor story element but it makes you lose confidence in the writing.
- Characters randomly infer correct conclusions about key plot elements, which is just lazy. "Oh, X must be at Y". It's like everyone in the book is mildly psychic just so the author doesn't have to work at moving the plot along in a sensible way.
- There are NO female characters until about 2/3 of the way through, and even then she's not a real person. She's a love interest, so it's sufficient to describe her beauty and her hair over and over again but not really discuss her emotions or motivations or give her any real agency.
- The first time the villain is revealed, it's like a cross between Skeletor's lair and the intro to Trap-door. The whole thing is ridiculously cartoony. If they ever met, Sauron would make Brona seem like Gilbert Gottfried playing Gargamel in a Smurfs musical.
The thing I hated most was the terrible writing. Each chapter features dozens of consecutive pages of long, bloated, verbose paragraphs which achieve little. Dialogue is minimal even where it would be obvious to use, which means we get less of a sense of the interaction between characters and never actually grow to like any of them. They're all humourless and one-dimensional. The writing is clunky, drawn out, lacks tension and is badly paced.
Avoid it. It's the worst book I've read in a while. The fact it spawned so many sequels is baffling to me.
I saw all of the Lord of the Rings rip-off criticisms before I started and decided to give it a go anyway as it's an accusation that gets thrown at a lot of fantasy books, simply because LOTR is the pinnacle. However, I was totally unprepared for just how shockingly plagiarised it was. I thought it might be the abstract sense of the world or the vague plot. Not so - characters, action scenes, plot points, politics, it's all been stolen. You would think that coming some time after LOTR, the author would at least improve on the original. Nope. This is as poor as it gets.
Here is a list of things I really didn't like:
- The backstory alluding to an interesting deviation from the LOTR world building is left behind after just one chapter - it was the only original and intriguing aspect of the whole book and it was left unexplored and therefore a clunky, and ultimately unnecessary, add-on.
- There are clumsy plot holes littered throughout but especially at the start of the book. At one point characters know about things they simply have no way of knowing. It's a minor story element but it makes you lose confidence in the writing.
- Characters randomly infer correct conclusions about key plot elements, which is just lazy. "Oh, X must be at Y". It's like everyone in the book is mildly psychic just so the author doesn't have to work at moving the plot along in a sensible way.
- There are NO female characters until about 2/3 of the way through, and even then she's not a real person. She's a love interest, so it's sufficient to describe her beauty and her hair over and over again but not really discuss her emotions or motivations or give her any real agency.
- The first time the villain is revealed, it's like a cross between Skeletor's lair and the intro to Trap-door. The whole thing is ridiculously cartoony. If they ever met, Sauron would make Brona seem like Gilbert Gottfried playing Gargamel in a Smurfs musical.
The thing I hated most was the terrible writing. Each chapter features dozens of consecutive pages of long, bloated, verbose paragraphs which achieve little. Dialogue is minimal even where it would be obvious to use, which means we get less of a sense of the interaction between characters and never actually grow to like any of them. They're all humourless and one-dimensional. The writing is clunky, drawn out, lacks tension and is badly paced.
Avoid it. It's the worst book I've read in a while. The fact it spawned so many sequels is baffling to me.