Number 24 this year is Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. I picked this book up because my one cousin is a fanatical Goodkind follower, and so, even though I'd been... ehn about reading his books in the past, I thought I would pick this one out of the library and see what A is so devoted to.

I'm afraid I'm still not sure...

I wanted to like this book. I truly did. In fact, I did, for about the first quarter of it. I liked the main characters, Richard Cypher and Khalan, and I liked the supporting characters, and I liked the mystery, and the world building (the part where they cross the boundary was really, really well done).

But eventually I felt it just sort of devolved into cliche and pointless subplots. It became unrelentlessly bleak. Now, I know that bleakness is something that goes with a lot of high fantasy, afterall they're often dealing with end of the world scenarios, but skilled writers (be they fantasy or not) can balance the bleakness, whether with lightness of humour, or lightness of the characters succeeding in a task. Tolkein was particularly good at this, and I've always though Kay excelled at it as well. But Goodkind doesn't. He heaps impossibility and obsticle after obsticle onto the characters that after awhile I just wanted them to get the hell on with it. Some of these obsticles drew out into completely unneeded, undesired subplots that really didn't have anything to do with the main plot (even though they supposedly did). The one sado-masichistic-torture plot really just had me thinking... uh why? I don't need torture porn in my fantasy thank you very much (yes, I also know rape is a common theme in fantasy. Even my beloved Fionavar Tapestry gives into that trope. But at least there there was a REAL purpose, and the character rises above it and gets revenge in such a magnificent way. In WFR, well, there just seems to be some Stockholm Syndrome going on. Ugh).

I wanted more out of this than I got. The reluctant hero was cliche. The love story was cliche. The SOOOOOOO evil badguy was cliche (as were his SOOOOO evil henchmen), the hero's unreveled-until-the-last-minute-but-not-really-a-surprise parentage was a cliche. There are some interesting ideas burried in this book, but perhaps if Goodkind had slowed down and not thrown eveyrthing thing but the kitchen sink at his characters (and perhaps written less soapy dialogue), then maybe those interesting ideas could have shone through a bit more.