The Great Hunt finally allows The Wheel of Time to become its own thing, breaking free from most of Tolkien’s structure that so hindered The Eye of the World. It’s a competent fantasy novel that focuses on fleshing out its world while introducing and developing elements that allow the series to stand on its own feet. As the title implies, …
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Brandon Sanderson’s first published novel, Elantris, fares much better when it comes to handling the twists and turns of the story than when it’s time to develop its characters and social discussions. The book’s main setting is the city of Elantris, a place wrapped in an aura of mysticism. Its inhabitants, once powerful, shining, and immortal, now find themselves cursed, …
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The Last Wish marks the first big appearance of the most famous character of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski: the witcher Geralt of Rivia. Geralt’s subsequent adventures became so famous internationally that even a video game series called The Witcher was created to further develop them. But unlike the videogame – which has an intricate web of political plotlines – the …
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Unlike its predecessor, Magician: Master, doesn’t suffer too much from the split of the original novel into two books. Its problems are mostly its own, with a narrative that is unable to justify the strange focus on some of the supporting characters while failing to conclude any plotlines in a way that is not anticlimactic or arbitrary. The story of …
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Written by Raymond E. Feist, Magician: Apprentice is a fantasy novel that presents a familiar universe, built on genre tropes, with a story with wasted potential, suffering from some shallow worldbuilding and a highly problematic climax. The book follows a young orphan named Pug and his best friend, Tomas, who see their lives drastically change the moment they come across …
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Deadhouse Gates, the second volume in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, is an even better book than the first one. Beautifully structured and written, the novel offers an incredibly pessimistic story with a wide range of tragic characters, whose arcs always come back to the same question: how to face the horrors of violence? The story …
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The Sword of Shannara, a fantasy novel written by Terry Brooks in 1977, tells a classic, derivative story that is marred by repetition and the unwillingness to detach itself from its greatest inspiration: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. The protagonist of the book is Shea, a half-elf who, one day, receives a visit from a …
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The first book in The Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, is an epic fantasy novel that wears its inspirations on its sleeve – even to a fault: its story is clearly based on Arthurian legends and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s Tolkien who most shackles Robert Jordan’s novel. The Eye of the World shines …
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One of the most recurrent problems in fantasy novels concerns exposition, with the intricate world created for the story being described in too much detail, to the detriment of the characters and pacing. But, sometimes, the opposite is true: the world is put aside for too long and so fails to capture our interest. In Gardens of the Moon, one …
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