I have not been reading Terry Brooks in years, and I have to say "finding" him again with this book was a most pleasant surprise.
If you have read the Shannara books, please be wary and do not approach this book with the same ideas: this is no fantasy, or at least, not fantasy in the classic sense: the story unfolds in a post-apocalyptic scenario like has been told hundreds of times, but Mr. Brooks manages to add a new soul to it, avoiding all clichés you could expect.
The book unfolds "slowly", but this slowness does not affect the eagerness to go on, to turn page after page: as I see it, it is simply the price we have to pay to get to know well the main characters that will star in the next books, and once again I have not been disappointed by the level of insight that we are provided on each of them.
What truly crowns this book as a must-have for any Shannara fan, however, is the hints you get in the beginning (and the confirmations you get later on) that this story might have to do more with the world we learnt to know in the Shannara series than you might expected by a first glance.
The only warning I feel to give concerns the ending: this is a major cliffhanger, so if you think this may be a bother and maybe spoil a truly good story, then you might want to wait for the whole trilogy to be published before buying this book.
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