A review by mpaulwhite
Blood of the Fold by Terry Goodkind
2.0
Some spoilers below.
This is the best of the first three books of the series, in my opinion. The plotline remains hopelessly derivative, Richard has no flaws with an internal locus, and the author still has a disturbing tendency to raise the stakes or demonstrate the perfidy of his snarling, mustachioed villains mainly by depicting the sexual assault of women, often on a genocidal scale. We get it - they're bad. Do we have to cut off nipples or force sorceresses to serve as comfort women to an entire ship of sailors?
Don't even get me started on the author's apparent deep distrust of any collective or institutional endeavor. The reviewers who've said that Mr. Goodkind writes Ayn Rand books with magic may actually be doing a disservice to Ayn Rand, odious as she is.
By the third (long!) book of a fantasy series, we should have a much better explanation of how magic works in world - Richard's "war wizard" magic is controlled by instinct, so the viewpoint character has no idea what he can do with magic or how he does it, aside from knowing that he has to act on instinct. This is deeply unsatisfying to a reader of more recent fantasy, as every time Richard manages to use his magic it feels like a deus ex machina - he can do what he needs to do to solve the problem, and there's no reason why he would be able to do the same things again later because he doesn't know how he did it the first time.
For all that, the pacing is actually pretty good in this book, and all of the sins recounted above are less pronounced than they were in the first two books of the series.
This is the best of the first three books of the series, in my opinion. The plotline remains hopelessly derivative, Richard has no flaws with an internal locus, and the author still has a disturbing tendency to raise the stakes or demonstrate the perfidy of his snarling, mustachioed villains mainly by depicting the sexual assault of women, often on a genocidal scale. We get it - they're bad. Do we have to cut off nipples or force sorceresses to serve as comfort women to an entire ship of sailors?
Don't even get me started on the author's apparent deep distrust of any collective or institutional endeavor. The reviewers who've said that Mr. Goodkind writes Ayn Rand books with magic may actually be doing a disservice to Ayn Rand, odious as she is.
By the third (long!) book of a fantasy series, we should have a much better explanation of how magic works in world - Richard's "war wizard" magic is controlled by instinct, so the viewpoint character has no idea what he can do with magic or how he does it, aside from knowing that he has to act on instinct. This is deeply unsatisfying to a reader of more recent fantasy, as every time Richard manages to use his magic it feels like a deus ex machina - he can do what he needs to do to solve the problem, and there's no reason why he would be able to do the same things again later because he doesn't know how he did it the first time.
For all that, the pacing is actually pretty good in this book, and all of the sins recounted above are less pronounced than they were in the first two books of the series.