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Recent Reading: The Sword of Shannara

I don't know how Keith convinced me to read a 700-plus-page book that doesn't have the word "Potter" in the title. But he loves this book so much that he gave it to our nephew, Ben, and to our friends' son, Cody, for Christmas. After Cody told his dad that this book is better than The Lord of the Rings, I had to check on that for myself. For those friends of mine who may remember a little chart I made some years ago that detailed how Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune is little more than a retooled East of Eden (oh boy, did I tick off some Steinbeck fans with that), you may appreciate my overwhelming desire to make a similar chart comparing The Sword of Shannara to The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The Sword of Shannara is a fantasy adventure about a fellowship band of people--human, elf, and dwarf--who seek out a legendary talisman, which holds the key to saving Middle Earth the four corners of the land from oppression under the evil Sauron Warlock Lord Brona. The book has everything you could possibly want: Really bad guys, improbable heroes, royalty, traitors, love, treachery, a huge battle scene, etc. I admit freely that I was caught up in the story, even if I didn't find myself to be completely invested in some of the characters I should have identified with.

At the start, Keith told me he was concerned that I would not like Brooks's writing style. How right he was. Brooks is very big on narration and uses it with abandon, to the exclusion of letting me, as a reader, immerse myself into the story. For example, at one point, two characters fight a couple of bad guys and continue down into the dungeon to fight some more bad guys. A page later, as they start to fight the new group of bad guys, Brooks interrupts the action to tell me that Menion picked up a sword from one of the fallen bad guys during the last fight. Well, he should have told me that when it happened. The book is full of similar irritating instances, which may only be irritating to the writer side of me.

I do not agree with Cody that this book is better than The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And even though I seem to have a lot of negative things to say about it, I was willing to risk motion sickness by reading the last two pages in a moving car to see how the book ended.