Review: The Sword of Shannara

Pin It The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

When I saw the ComicCon preview for the upcoming Shannara Chronicles television series (https://youtu.be/crjkQHnDYu0) my jaw hit the floor and I immediately scrambled to pick up a copy of The Sword of Shannara. I figured anything that looked that amazing on my screen and had millions of cult followers must be a book series of epic proportions. I'm not going to go into painstaking detail about my choice to stop approximately 25% of the way through the first book in the series but suffice it to say that reading it was felt like deja vu. The further and further I went along the more familiar the story became... and the more it annoyed me.

As many others have complained, The Sword of Shannara mimics Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Rings so closely that it is hard to stop your mind from a constant comparison. The names are different and the geography may not be exactly the same but Sword of Shannara is definitely modeled very closely after Tolkien and I couldn't bring myself to keep reading. It's not that it was bad, just that it lacked the depth of the original.

After seeing the preview for the show, it is likely that I will be a regular viewer but the book gets filed in my DNF bin at only 25%.

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