The Sorcerers Daughter

Terry Brooks is not a \”bad\” author. He\’s productive. He hits his deadlines. He\’s kept this series going – for better or worse – for a long time. When you have other, more successful authors releasing books once every, oh… five years or so, it\’s good to see someone with the workmanlike ethic of a Brooks. That said, my impression is that the publisher has declared that stand-alone novels are a no-no and everything has to be a trilogy. Maybe this sells better. What it doesn\’t do is get better books written. Brooks has been on the decline ever since he stopped writing single books and started writing trilogies. His books nowadays are padded and bloated, stuffed with navel-gazing that never seems to go anywhere, and endlessly repeated plot lines about the same three or four magical doodads that Shannara contains. All this, however, is just a general overview of the present-day Terry Brooks. This book in particularly, while not his worst or most boring, is an interesting study in everything that bothers me about the later Shannara novels. The first specific thing that really bothers me about this book is a repetition of a theme from the first book in this trilogy \”The High Druid\’s Blade\”: The kidnapping and mental/physical torture of a female character. The first time it was disturbing, the second time it was gratuitous. The other thing is the… well I don\’t even know how to phrase it. \”Anti-love story\” might be a good name for what happens in this novel. We\’re basically reading an emotional affair that happens behind a character\’s back, and it\’s… not fun. Ultimately, the problem with \”Later Brooks\” is that there\’s never any real sense of victory at the end of his books. I don\’t know if he\’s trying to be grim or realistic or morally ambiguous, but I don\’t enjoy finishing a book and having this sick feeling. It really started in \”High Druid of Shannara\” and its only gotten worse from there. We\’re not even making hard trades of one person\’s happiness for another, people are just miserable by the time a Shannara trilogy ends now. I\’m one of those people.

I have read all of Terry\’s Books and love the Shannara world, but his writing seems to have lost something since he wrote First King of Shannara. His character development has waned in his later books and it almost seems that he rushes through many of them. I bet Lester Del ray would not have allowed some of them to be published in their current form. Nevertheless, this one was par for many of his latest and certainly held my interest because Terry wrote it and it was the Shannara world, but I thought that the conclusion of the main character, Paxon Leah, really was anticlimactic. The whole series revolved around him until this book and you were left with a very unsatisfying conclusion for Paxon and the series antagonist Arcannon Rai. It is like Terry has gotten board writing in the Shannara world and is anxious to conclude it and move on. (Sigh.. I long for a book like Wishsong or a series like The Heritage of Shannara). That was when he was at the top of his game.

I have read every Terry Brooks except the last 5. Book definitely fell flat on story line. Not his usual 3 part series. I always am highly disappointed when authors (typically at the behest of their publishers) feel compelled to bring into their works LGBTQ+ elements. The vast majority of their readership are regular people and have no interest in character relations that are LGBTQ+, and a larger percentage of these find such elements objectionable in their entertainment. I recognize people are going to choose to live their lives in such manners and I still love them and will choose to be friends and have close family relations. However I do not need stories about a relatively small, fringe part of society in every book, TV show, and movie that I read or watch. Perhaps give me a warning along with the explicit rating, an LGBTQ+ rating so that I can choose to not buy the book, TV show, or movie. This could have the added benefit for those that you are trying to sell by including such content that they will be more likely to purchase because youve chosen to cater to this part of society and you can proudly display it. Those of us who find such material objectionable as well as your publishers can both win from such an arrangement!

I have been a long time fan of Terry\’s books but this one by far has been the worst of the whole Shannara series up to the last one, which I haven\’t read yet. The ending felt rushed especially when he brought Chrys, Leofur and Imric back from the Wilderun without explaining how they managed since earlier in the book he says it took hours to reach that bower going in. But by far, the worst part for me was how the hero, Paxon, got dumped after everything he had been through. This last book of this particular series does not have a legitimate happy ending and leaves the reader completely in the dark as to what happens to the characters. I can\’t imagine Miriya and Paxon ever getting together and what becomes of Chrys? Does she become a druid? We are left totally in the dark.

Spoiler alert: SJW cultural Marxism ruins everything it touches. The Sorcerer\’s Daughter is no exception. Two-dimensional lesbo couple, one \”black as ink.\”? Oh brother. Corny as all get out half a$$ attempt at a \”Twilight\” love triangle. \”Life-partners?\” \”Bed mates?\” So much eye-rolling on my part to this anticlimactic poor attempt at writing now that Terry Brooks is trying to please the MTV crowd because of the awful TV series adaptation of Shannara. I enjoyed the first book of this series so much. This third installment is a waste of time. As I\’m reading the book and can see there\’s not much left, I\’m thinking to myself, \”How is he going to wrap this book up with so few pages left?\” In the end, I felt as Paxon Leah did, sitting on my bed wondering, \”WTF just happened???\” Thanks for selling out Terry Brooks. I may now just trash my Shannara books altogether.

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