It turns out, naturally, that evil is afoot to the east in the form of the charismatic D'Haran leader Darken Rahl. Richard helps her dispatch these mysterious assailants, and then she shocks him with the news that she has entered the Westlands from the Midlands, by crossing the supposedly impenetrable Boundary. Out one day scouring the woods for clues to his father's murder, he meets a young woman named Kahlan who is being stalked by four armed men. Synopsis: Richard Cypher is a young man living in the Westlands, a magic-free area that exists peacefully apart from its easterly neighbors, the Midlands and D'Hara, by virtue of a mountain range shielded with a magical Boundary.
While he won't win any awards for originality (to put it gently), Goodkind has created a quest fantasy that eschews the most obvious Tolkienian clichés, offers up its fair share of unexpected twists and turns, and, most importantly, features absorbing characters who, though archetypes, engage the reader both intellectually and emotionally. Yes, this doorstopper of a novel is markedly flawed in several areas, and many of these flaws are due to both its extreme length as well as the routine mistakes one would reasonably expect a first-time novelist to make. Happily, I am able to say: much, much better than Jordan. (Clearly James Frenkel is the most generous editor in the business in allowing his writers to indulge themselves this way.) The important issue at hand for us is: Do the merits of the story justify the length and the investment of time required by the reader? Pissed-off readers of this website already know how I would answer that question in Jordan's case. The question of whether or not this sort of thing is just writerly machismo gone horribly overboard is perhaps best settled by a critical rumble in the alley. With this 820-page monster debut, Goodkind becomes the heavyweight champion of the VLFN sweepstakes, even out-Jordaning Robert Jordan in the effort to astonish potential readers with the utter enormity of his creation. Yessiree, there's no denying that you can't miss Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth novels on your local bookstore shelves, if only for the fact that they're so goddamn huge that one copy of a Goodkind novel takes up the same rackspace as three or four novels by most anyone else. Book cover art by Keith Parkinson (left) Doug Beekman (right).
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