Chainfire

Terry Goodkind

It will be, as I am writing this, three years tomorrow since I opened the cover of Wizard's First Rule. I know some people who have been with the series since the day the first book came out (we're going on eleven years now). Given how I feel, having finished this, I can't imagine what they're thinking.

Chainfire is the ninth book in the Sword of Truth series, and (supposedly) the first book in the final trilogy. While the idea that opens the book is unabashedly brilliant, it seems obvious from the presentation that neither Mr. Goodkind nor Tor wants to do anything but get this series over with. The good news is that that probably means we'll get books ten and eleven relatively quickly. The bad news is, we can probably expect the same drop in quality we saw in the last two books.

Goodkind has finally changed the way he works the endless amounts of rehash, but he has done it in the worst way possible; rather than giving us a hundred fifty pages of rehash, it's now scattered throughout the novel, almost to the point where it feels like the novel is taking place in two different timeframes, and you've already read one of them. Add onto this that the series, whose preachiness took a jump in the previous book, takes another, larger jump here. Goodkind spent seven books quite nicely showing and not telling, but in the past twelve hundred odd pages of this series, we've had far too much speechifying for novels. It needs to go away.

That's Goodkind's side of the letdown. Tor's is the incredible number of typos to be found here. The series has never been exactly pristine in proofreading, but the work that was done here is truly pathetic. Hundreds of typos got through. Someone at Tor really needs to be fired over this.

Probably the only thing that kept me turning pages, aside from the fact that I've already logged three years with Richard, Kahlan, and Zedd, is that Goodkind really did come up with a great twist to kick off the final trilogy. Richard awakes after a random battle (truly random; one of the men stumbled, almost literally, upon one of Jagang's scouting parties) and a very nasty healing process to find that Kahlan is missing and, what's more, no one around him remembers her existence. Goodkind toys with this idea quite nicely throughout the novel (when he's not rehashing stuff we already know; unfortunately, this device does allow him to do a lot more of that), taking It's a Wonderful Life and putting a much darker and more wide-ranging spin on it. If Goodkind can keep up the originality, he'll at least keep me for the last two novels in the series. If he can pull himself back to the incredible ability he showed in the series' first four volumes, he might also manage to pick up a whole lot of new converts.

Fans of the series may want to skim books eight and nine, and spend the next year with me fervently hoping that books ten and eleven improve on them.