Dragaera

Literary Disappointments (was: The LKH thing)

Mon Feb 17 13:29:36 PST 2003


On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Gomi no Sensei wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Feb 2003 13:05:49 -0800, Richard Malena <rmalena at softhome.net>
> wrote:
>
> >> E.g., Terry Goodkind.
>
> [rant elided]
>
> > We start with "Wizard's First Rule," and this is actually a good book.
>
> Whoa, whoa. WFR sucked donkey balls. It was Boy Hero With a Secret Past and
> Legacy of Secret Power, right off the back of the cereal box.
>

I think WFR should be read widely, not as a good book, but as an
instructively and amusingly bad book.  The prose isn't so slipshod that
it's painful to read, (some of) the characters have enough behind them to
make the awful dialogue interesting (for example, the Big Bad is polite
and rather insightful in his way), the plot if nothing else moves along,
and at least one plot device (the Confessors) is new (to me anyway) and
has some interesting cultural implications in that world.  There aren't
many (intentionally) comic novels that beat almost any page in WFR - just
read the first few sentences, which remind me of the opening of To Reign
in Hell minus the irony.  Also one senses that the author might actually
have some talent if braced by a good editor, which gives the whole a
slightly tragic cast which I find interesting.


- Philip