I eventually decided to give this book a read, since my brother is head over heels in love with the Shannara series. Every year there's a new Shannara book on his Christmas and Birthday list, so I decided to crack open the first one and see what all the fuss was about.

I must be honest, I wasn't particularly impressed. This book is long--and not in the sense of word count; I've read books with higher word counts, in far less time. This one is long-winded. I simply could not get into it. Often while reading I would "zone out" for pages and pages, and then have no idea what was going on later in the story. The characters aren't particularly memorable, and their manner of speaking is inconsistent. That, coupled with the author's infuriating habit of using "the other" to refer to a speaker after the first speaker has just finished a two page diatribe, makes it insanely difficult to keep track of who's in a particular scene.

There are more twists and turns in this book than a snakes and ladders game, and it's frequently also not entirely clear where one scene or point in time ends and other starts (see what I did there?).

I've read many people bemoaning how derivative this book is of Lord of the Rings. I have to say, I didn't find that at all. Granted, there were certain small sections of this book which reminded me of lots of things I'd read in lots of books before, including but not limited to Lord of the Rings. However, many of those books were actually written AFTER this one, so which is derivative of which? Tolkein was the father of modern fantasy anyway, so all fantasy written since will always tend to have a semblance of familiarity with his books. Besides, I wasn't in love with Lord of the Rings anyway.

There's not much more to say about this book. It's a decent story, I guess, but I found it those parts I was awake for a bit predictable. If you can follow the plot and all the characters (again, of which there are far too many, in my opinion), you might enjoy it. I didn't particularly, though.