I liked it and am excited to watch the t.v series now. The world building was great and i loved the characters but the battle scenes did bore me at points. But overall very good read.

I liked it and am excited to watch the t.v series now. The world building was great and i loved the characters but the battle scenes did bore me at points. But overall very good read.

If you want to read my review of the first book in the trilogy you can do that HERE . One of my biggest gripes about the last book was the lack of female representation, Brooks seems to have fixed that with the introduction of Amberle and Eretria. While Amberle was prominent throughout the book Eretria was a bit of a side character. Wil (the main character and grandson to the previous protagonist of the last book) must continue the family business and save the world from darkness. This books pacing was better, yet it still had the long winded history monologues of the first book.

I did like Wil and Amberle, although it pissed me off that no matter how many times Amberle asks Wil to keep her up to date on what was going on Wil still kept things in the dark. It is this weird cliche thing authors use about keeping the women safe and usually ends up just making things worse. Besides that I really enjoyed the book. It was faster paced and seemed to carry more emotion with the characters than the last, at least for me.

Reading this book does make me want to check out the T.V. show, I like comparing books to shows/movies. ( )

This is the 2nd book in the Shannara Series. The first book was Terry Brooks 1st published, I gave that one 4 stars for the effort and I was happy to move on to book 2 as the story line is wonderful, and I was curious to find out if his writing would improve. Not so much his writing, but his over use of descriptions. *Sigh* Not so much....this book would have come in closer to 400 pages if the Editors had done their job and IMO told him to take it easy with the adjectives.

Still his world building and characters have drawn me in. This book takes place 50 years after the WarLord was defeated. Wil Ohmsford, grandson of the holder of the Elfstones, is the hero of the tale. We find out early that Wil has been gifted the Stones, and it is clear (at least in my mind) that this gift will only lead to something bad.

The EllCrys-the Tree of Life that protects the Westlands of The Elves is dying. So of course there is a Quest, there is a story of love, there is danger and lots of battle scenes. A good old fashion fantasy.

As I said, Brooks has me hooked now-so I will continue to read the series-and hope that somewhere along the line his description of the dark woody area-will say just that.

3 1/2 stars and rounding up to 4, because it is a darn captivating world ( )

I re-read this book recently, having enjoyed it in the past when it was first published. Now, though, it feels derivative and slow. All the battle scenes just became a boring blur to me. The demons were just this evil faceless mass that was winning because of numbers, and all the fights were a variation on this theme. I liked the idea of a magical tree being responsible for protecting the land.

The characters could have been better. Wil is just stupid at times. And he's been studying healing and is called 'Healer' but we never see him actually healing anyone, except in one instance that backfires. It would have been interesting to see more of that reverence for life in his character. Amberle is the token innocent child like woman, and Eretria is the token sexual woman. These stereotypes bugged me. But at least Elfstones had two more female characters than Sword.

But, I had a lot of nostalgia for this series, back when there wasn't much in the way of original fantasy. So three stars. ( )