Wards of Faerie: The Dark Legacy of Shannara by Terry Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It was with a little trepidation that I began reading Wards of Faerie. It had been decades since I’d last read a Terry Brooks novel, and the Shannara series was never one I had gotten into too deeply, mostly for a lack of resources. I knew that over the years the breadth of the story had grown, and that series that didn’t used to be related, like the Word and the Void, had been incorporated into the larger mythos. Still, most of my exposure came from a summer reading through the Magic Kingdom books. Could I jump in unscathed?
The Wards of Faerie, as it turns out, is very open to the new reader. A brief run through wikipedia wouldn’t hurt the new reader, but Terry Brooks is ever the consummate story teller, and with almost no effort gives us a story that is very easy to fall into. It is a world where science and magic are at ends with each other, with many of the secrets of magic lost even to the Druids, caretakers of such knowledge. Aphenglow Elessedil, an elf and a Druid, stumbles upon a lost journal that hints at the whereabouts of the famed elfstones. The Druid’s quest to recover the elfstones will mean the gathering of a party and following a vision beyond the known lands as they seek out the lost elfstones.
It’s always a pleasure to read something written by a master of the craft, and this was no exception. Brooks has spent over thirty years developing this world, and the world-building shows. The world that this story is set in has a depth that we can see just beneath the surface without being dragged through it, which helps the story move along at a good pace. The characters that populate it are well developed and believable, rather than the stock two dimensional characters that seem to litter the genre so often.
Knowing in advance that this will be yet another trilogy, though, I do have to say I was a bit disappointed with where the book ended. This isn’t just the poignant disappointment of a story that ended sooner than the reader may have wanted. The bulk of the book was spent developing characters and introducing us to the world as it is, but just as the party is formed and the real action began to start up, the book came to an end.
My rating of this book came after a lot of thinking, and ultimately was tied to the fact that the story, the meat of why we are reading, is cut too short too soon. Knowing that we are only looking at a trilogy, it seems as though too much time was spent developing characters rather than moving the plot along. Fans of the milieu will enjoy the book, knowing that it will lead somewhere in the next book. Casual readers, though, I think will be put off unless they are already committed to seeing the story develop in the next volume.
My thanks to Netgalley and Random House for giving me the opportunity to review this work and providing an advanced reader’s copy.