The Wounded Land

This 2nd trilogy begins with a fantastic premise, everything has changed. We get to explore and try to discover both why, and how to fix things. Donaldson gets a lot of mileage out of this conceit.

I enjoyed that Covenant is different this time, he feels matured or at least at peace with his life and history. This “tilted” quest is very good, the new sidekick is extremely intriguing though their arc does not get finished. In fact this whole book very much so feels like 1/3rd of a story - so the conclusion is not super conclusive (more on this later).

I think the themes have to do with how things that we are supposed to love and cherish get corrupted, by ourselves, and others, and how facing and experiencing that affected “thing” can be extremely hard, but that it is worth risking yourself in order to make things right (I think. I'm only ⅓ into a trilogy). Corruption is built on falseness, in word and deed. In this novel the corruption of words and the record of history is explored and leads to profound moments.

The book drags a little bit in the third act and the familiarity of fantasy quest tropes made it a little repetitive. But remember how I said the conclusion isn't conclusive? Well it IS cathartic - Donaldson manages to make you forget the larger story and dwell on a bow that needed to be tied. What we got was one of the most powerful and good feeling moments in all of his work I've thus read. Home run of an ending, it was both perfectly logical for his story and also a rabbit out of a hat.