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A review by ferrisscottr
The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks
4.0
Read this many times over the years. I'm considering doing an entire Shannara read through so wanted to go back to the beginning.
I consider this the actual start of the series even though it's book 2 since the first book (Sword of Shannara) was just a retelling of the Lord of the Rings.
Essentially evil has been locked away and held in place by a magic tree for untold years but the tree is dying which means all the evil will escape and all the bad things will happen. So he gives us an elf and a descendant of Jerle Shannara to embed a seed from the magic tree and hence get a new magic tree to stop the evil-doers.
This is old school fantasy from the 80's - bad guys vs. good guys, all the different races, magic all over the place, great characters, fast moving. If it came out today I'm pretty sure it would be labeled as YA but it's good.
Brooks is someone whose writing improves over the years. At the point of the writing of this book he's still not all that good but he is improving and I'll give him a pass since his writing does get to the point in a few more books where he's damn good.
My gut says to give this 3 stars but just based on the historical perspective of this series and what it did to the genre I'll bump it up to 4 stars.
I consider this the actual start of the series even though it's book 2 since the first book (Sword of Shannara) was just a retelling of the Lord of the Rings.
Essentially evil has been locked away and held in place by a magic tree for untold years but the tree is dying which means all the evil will escape and all the bad things will happen. So he gives us an elf and a descendant of Jerle Shannara to embed a seed from the magic tree and hence get a new magic tree to stop the evil-doers.
This is old school fantasy from the 80's - bad guys vs. good guys, all the different races, magic all over the place, great characters, fast moving. If it came out today I'm pretty sure it would be labeled as YA but it's good.
Brooks is someone whose writing improves over the years. At the point of the writing of this book he's still not all that good but he is improving and I'll give him a pass since his writing does get to the point in a few more books where he's damn good.
My gut says to give this 3 stars but just based on the historical perspective of this series and what it did to the genre I'll bump it up to 4 stars.