The Sword of Shannara

Too many inconsistencies. Every couple of paragraphs I would cringe at the spilled nonsense, that wasn't even disguised as good writing.

Int the first meeting with Allanon (Gandalf), the druid (wizard) basically assaults the main character (some character) Flick for no apparent reason:“See, I could kill you, but I won't. Learned the lesson? Never talk to strangers. Now, take me to your brother, he has a destiny to fulfill, you are just a sidekick. I won't go into details about it though, just gonna say he is the chosen one, and if he doesn't do anything about it, the world will end. What does that mean you ask? What should he do? Who am I? Why should he trust me? Well, that is the feeling I want to pass: confusion! By the time he has the opportunity to ask me all these questions I will be long gone, hehehehe.”So, after that very convincing argument, with impeding doom lurking around, Flick and his brother Shea do exactly what you would expect of them: absolutely nothing about it. What did Allanon expected with that kind of attitude? Well, at least he did leave behind the Elven Stones to help out the brothers. And everyone KNOWS what that means. What, you don't? Well, if the author keeps mentioning the name in the story over and over, with reactions of amazement from the characters, it will soon sink in... just a few more hundred pages.Anyway, after a few weeks, an ugly creature appears. It can smell Shea's blood (I think they were warned about this by Allanon). They feel they must leave to prevent harm to come to their village. They have two alternative paths to follow: a safe route that the enemy will expect them to take, or the dangerous route, which might kill them. They take the dangerous route, but somehow (blood smelling anyone?) the ugly creature still follows them.Shea want to enlist the help of an old friend of them, which was the prince of a neighboring country or something. But Flick does not like the guy, because he is a meany, so he opposes the idea. Way to go Sam, I mean, Flick! Because I'll be dammed if I will ask for the help of a powerful ally to save the world if I don't like him, even though we have no one else to turn to.By the time they arrived at that country, I stopped reading. As it turns out his brother is the main character? Both were presented very poorly. This is a major sin in stories. The main character should appear first and be made very clear about it.

This book is primarily bad because of the obviously borrowed ideas from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. If you've read LotR, you'll find Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo, Samwise, Boromir, Grima, Sauron, Gimli, Legolas (as 2 elves), and even Gollum. Locations? The Shire, Rivendell, there's even a mountain version of Moria and a Gandalf-like fight with what's really just a Balrog and a Gandalf-like fall as well.

The writing itself is not that bad, but the pacing is quite slow, with a lot of reminiscing portions. The last part of the book gets better but overall, if you skip this one, you wouldn't lose out much on the world of Shannara.

So, I definitely went into this with a lot of bias. Everyone had already told me this was a blatant Tolkein rip-off and Terry Brooks is a cheap hack. I can see where everyone is coming from, but I'm going to try to make a review of my own opinions.

The first half of the book, it was hard to avoid the LOTR comparisons. Brooks has openly confirmed his inspiration and his desire to write an LOTR that was a little less academic, a little more action based. That's fair. Did he succeed? I don't really think so. There were a lot of first novel issues. The third person omniscient narrator was a little too blatant in its perceptions. The characters were pretty bland and one-sided. You could say some of this for Rings too, but Tolkein has a prose that is a joy to read, where Brooks is (at this point at least), pretty dull.

The second half was a lot better. The distinct parallels are much fewer, and the new characters like Panamon Creel and Keltset made the action/adventure side come to the fore. One of the strongest criticisms of Rings is that pretty people are good and ugly monsters are bad, and Shannara avoids this with characters like Keltset and the healer gnomes. He at least recognizes his villainous races as complex enough to have good people among them.

The biggest issue I had was it kind of felt like Brooks read LOTR and said, “You know what this needs? Less chicks.” It took 342 pages to get a female character onstage, and her role is limited to being obsessed over and kidnapped by male characters and doing absolutely nothing herself. But no, let's add more blonde, white dudes and get rid of all those pesky womenfolk.

Parts of the book were enjoyable, but I think overall its going to be pretty easy to forget. Still, it's another classic of the genre I can cross off my list.

Teenage me would have given this 4 or 5 stars; adult me struggled to give this a generous 3 stars. When I was younger, the resemblance to Lord of the Rings completely passed me by; now it screamed it in my face in virtually every scene.

Leaving aside the “homage” to LotR, I read a lot of these pages diagonally. Huge swaths of this could have been edited down drastically. I wouldn't say it was bad, but it did tend to err on the side of “you can never use too many adjectives”.

One of those books to be filed under “to be read when young”.

Din păcate, după vreo 150 pag mi-a fost clar că citesc această carte prea târziu: probabil în școala generală mi-ar fi plăcut mult, iar în liceu doar (poate) mi-ar fi plăcut. Mai târziu de-atât... e prea târziu.
Oricum, e un fantasy în stil clasic (adică țintit spre copii), foarte lent și cu preamăsură de cuvinte, și pe deasupra exagerat de asemănător cu Stăpânul Inelelor - mai mult decât un omagiu și mai aproape de clonă.