Stone of Tears (Sword of Truth, Book 2)

While not quite as good as the first one, this was still more entertaining than I've read in a while. Terry Goodkind is a masterful story crafter; having read the last one around a year ago, I still had no trouble jumping straight back into his world, as he re-introduced me to Richard, Kahlan, and Zedd, as well as the Mud People, and a couple more of the minor characters from the first novel. There are a few new ones, too!

The problem I had with this instalment was that, while the descriptions of people, places, and history were exquisite, there were a (precious) few times when they felt laboured. There are some info-dumps in this book, information that I as a reader needed to know to understand the context of a particular plot point, but that I felt could have been delivered in smaller, bite-sized chunks.

In other places, it felt as though the information I was given was even irrelevant, and put there, almost, as if the author simply had a word-count to keep to. The joys of working to the demands of a big publishing house, I guess.

Still, an above-average read, as I say. The next one was on my to-read shelf before I made it through the second chapter!

This has to be one of the most awful books I've ever subjected myself to. There were trouble already with the first book in the series, but I foolishly thought it might get better. I've listened to about a fifth of this audiobook now and that's just about as much as I can stomach.j

Really we can divide the entire series up in four parts so far.

About 20% crying. These characters cry constantly. Every little thing has them bawling their eyes out. At times I felt like I was about to drown in tears.

About 10% sex, and so far not one instance of it being consensual. Not ONE. Seriously every time any man who isn't Richard sees a woman she becomes prey.

About 20% Wheel of Time. The Sisters of Light was what finally made me give up in disgust. It's Aes Sedai all over again, complete with Mistress of Novices, angreal, black Ajah, the lot. Lifted completely from WoT, it seems to me, and altered clumsily to fit this story instead.

About 50% violence and torture, and revelling in it in a way that rather makes me worry for the mental health of Mr Goodkind. Every time someone is being trained for anything at all, it's through torture. Threats are thrown about all over the place. One character is even told by Richard at one point that if he opens his mouth to say anything at all for the rest of the day, even an apology, he will die. And Richard is supposed to be the good guy... At the point where I decided I'd had rather enough, one man was about to skin his best friend alive, and as a reward he gets to seduce a girl who didn't have a say in the matter. He is even told how to manipulate her into letting him. And all the way through, it has this feel of someone's fantasy being played out and the impression of the author going 'wow, yeah, cool!' at particularly gory bits. It's amazing some of these characters even have a single drop of blood left in them at all. I would say that it was amazing any of them were even sane, but sanity seems to be in short supply already in this book, so perhaps there wasn't really that much of it to lose in the first place...

Every single woman in this book seems to be a blood thirsty animal and every single man seems to be a potential sexual predator. All in all, the world building here is horrid. I definitely wouldn't want to live in it, not one bit. Even places that are supposed to be peaceful sound pretty awful. There's no balance to it at all. Honestly if it was me having to 'save the world' in this book, I'd probably just leave it to sort it out for itself, because I can't really see much worth saving.

Horrible book. Absolutely the most awful dreck.