Confessor
By Terry Goodkind
Audiobook read by Sam Tsoutsouvas
Copyright 2007
24 hours of listening!
The last of the Sword of Truth series culminated in much preaching from the author through his characters and a great deal of repetition.
Having listened to all of these books, each of which was exceedingly long, I rate this as the weakest.
Goodkind brought back almost all characters of any importance, contriving ways to add them to the plot.
Richard is a slave along with his beloved Kahlan. Kahlan, the last confessor, has lost her memory and doesn't know who she is. Richard, the Lord Rawl, has lost his gift for magic.
The book goes through many twists and turns to reunite the two and get their powers back. And of course the world will end if the Imperial Order continues its march through the New World and into the People's Palace.
Along the way there were many treatises about being left alone to live your life however you want, and many admonishments about how bad it is to have religion and group think, etc. And look for the solution, don't think about the problem.
While I agree with the advice, I tired of hearing it over and over and over and over and over again. I am not the only one to think this - there are a lot of bad reviews about Goodkind and many of the last books of this entire series at Amazon.
The first book, Wizards First Rule, was excellent. I really liked that book. The series began falling apart about midway through the 11 books it took Goodkind to finish this up. The writing worsened considerably. I have decided that once a writer is established, publishing houses stop applying editorial standards and just ship out whatever the author sends because I have seen so many the writing of many authors turn into crud after a number of books. Maybe it is simply burnout on the author's part but the publishers could have fixed a lot of the problems with this book, as well as previous ones, with good editing.
The best thing about this series is that my husband, who does not read much, became very interested from the very first audiobook, and we have listened to all of these books together. We took them on trips and listened to them driving around town. I think each book was over 20 hours long, so we have been listening to these for literally years.
I think my husband liked the final book better than I did, but he doesn't care so much about good writing as the plot. As he put it, at least Richard won in the end and for him that is what counted.
1.5 stars
I wish I could get into audio books, but I'm such a creature of habit that I miss holding it in my hands. I've tried a couple of times with a non-fiction piece but found myself trying to do other things while it played. After 10 minutes I cut it off. Perhaps I should try it while driving - then I HAVE to sit still.
ReplyDeleteI generally only listen to them in the car, too. Other good times are when you're painting the house or washing the dishes or dusting or something. Times when you might normally listen to the radio.
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