By the end of this book I wanted to strangle Jennsen and her goat. Truly. Jennsen who? Isn't this series about Richard and Kahlan? Not in this book, which isn't just an outlier in this series, it feels like filler. This is where I really felt Goodkind's clumsiness as a writer. What? You read six doorstopper tomes before this and didn't notice? Not really. Because I loved many of the characters, not just the two leads, but such secondary characters as Zedd, Nathan, Ann, Cara and Nicci, up to now I found myself glued to the page. Sure, I saw faults. Goodkind had become increasingly preachy, Richard increasingly Marty Stu, and the devices used to somehow keep Richard and Kahlan from consummating their love ridiculous. Some think the series had jumped the shark with the fifth book--or the sixth. Not me. Whatever their flaws I still found the books up to this one enjoyable and their doorstopper length wasn't felt by me. But this one? With all the characters I had grown to care about barely there until the end? Well, Jennsen really isn't enough to hold me for 736 pages. I rated the last book before this, Faith of the Fallen, four stars. This book gets one and a half stars. That's how much a fall off I felt in the quality of this book. The series doesn't so much decline as fall off a cliff--and it never recovered for me after that.

Best Series

 

I love few series but the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind would have to be my favorite. Wizards First Rule was given to me by my fiance when we first started dating 10+ years ago and it was the first fantasy book I'd ever read. 

 

Komischerweise scheine ich weniger zu lesen, wenn ich weniger zu tun habe - macht das Sinn? Nicht wirklich, allerdings scheint das bei mir so zu sein. Offenbar kompensiere ich Stress während der Uni durch Lesen und ohne Uni mache ich andere Dinge, tststs...

 

Die Königliche war auf jeden Fall ein toller Abschluss von Kristin Cashores Trilogie, etwas enttäuschend war dagegen der siebte Teil der Sword of Truth-Reihe, The Pillars of Creation. Überraschungssieger des Monats waren die beiden Thriller Fünf und Blinde Vögel von Ursula Poznanski, die ich nur jedem empfehlen kann.

 

Möge der April ertragreicher sein!

Unless you're totally committed to reading every single book in this series, don't bother with this - it does almost nothing to further the storyline. Skip it.

Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is utterly maddening.Following the first two books which I would hold up as two of the best fantasy novels ever written, the stories IMMEDIATELY became derivitive and dull. A big issue sweeps the land, Kahlan almost gets raped, Richard saves the day in the last hour because he's the only non helpless person in this universe. This was just awful in books like Blood of the Fold, but it wasn't until the Emperor Jagang story kicked in that the books became actively hard to read, all joy sucked out of the pages. So it was with great shock that I read Faith of the Fallen and discovered that Goodkind had taken a dramatic left turn and in doing so may have done his best work to date with the genuinely moving Faith of the Fallen. So I was all ready for Pillars of Creation to pick up where it left off and continue on from there.Instead I got a book about a little girl almost entirely unconnected to the plot until nearly the end of the book. It dragged, it had no resonant quality and it was most assuredly not moving and the choice to abandon his main characters for a full book with so many questions revolving around their well being was, while gutsy, entirely a disaster. All the momentum he earned with Faith of the Fallen was flushed and the books from there proceed with the same dreary monotony the ones before had.A completely failed chance to revive this series, this book is best forgotten entirely.