Rating: 
Summary: Not Bad
Review: Not bad book, I will re read it and get the rest of the series, but it had one major flaw.... too much sex! Alright, so in every good book there's a couple of rapists, a few whores, etc... but it seems that Goodkind is a tad obsessed with the man and women intimacies. He even finds a way to make sex a way to torture Richard! It seems to me that Goodkind needed something to fill the pages, so he put sex and rape every 20 pages!... Kahlan gets caught by the quad, who is led by Demmin Nass... a rapist! Richard is captured by Denna... WHo decides to sexually torture him!... Darken Rahl says that if he captures Kahlan, he will rape her so he can have a confessor son!... The examples could go on and on!! Once you get past the sex, it is actually a fantastic book...the plot is excellent, the charactures are well developped, Goodkind has created a world of Fantasy superior to other writers, which is why I gave it 4 stars!
Rating: 
Summary: so what if its cliche
Review: why does everyone get worked up over fantasies being too cliche? it doesnt bother me a bit. in my opinion goodkind uses them so that you can look at them in ways you didnt see before. im quite sure its snobbery to turn your nose up at work simply because lord of the rings said the same or the lion the witch and the wardrobe did that. niether of these novels were entirely original themselves. wizards first rule covers a range of topics and issues that people find themselves debating today. issues of race and culture, love and hate , forgiveness and revenge, good and evil, right and wrong, responsibility and blame, reason and passion, war and peace and religion... the list goes on every issue you could care to name is covered somewhere in the sword of truth series. if you only read it you would feel wiser for doing it. the book deals chiefly with the the difference between right and wrong and how context will alter your view. a bad person isnt necessarily wrong a wrong person isnt necessarily bad, good person isnt neccesarily right and a person thet is right isnt always good. therefore right and wrong have nothing to to do with good and evil. throughout the book a story unfolds where you come across such instances you have to decide along with the characters who is in the right and wheter they are good or bad. sometimes the characters get it wrong and you feel clever for knowing you have it right. its certainly not a literary classic but then it doesnt claim to be - its a fantastical story with a complex array of philosophical issues. you get so many different opinions where you find none are more right than others and youll find your self reading arguments between characters about certain things and want to join in. sometime they conlude on an unsatisfactory not (ie you dont agree with the conclusion) these people are usually the ones that say that the book is full of contradictions. that it is. so what! maybe they were meant to be there for us to find. life is full of contradictions & its great!
Rating:
Summary: =^_^=
Review: The sword of truth novels are by far the best fantasy books i have ever read. i just finished the Faith of the Fallen, and i love it even more! Great books!!
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic series... can't stop at one
Review: Contrary to the overdiagnostic reviews from amateur philosophers, I personally have not been able to put down any of the books in this series until I finished reading them. Yes, there is a common plot to each of the books, which may annoy the purists of the world, but on the other hand, the manner in which the plot was executed, the intricate detail, and the amazing accuracy of crafts, shows the dedication and articulate imagination of Terry Goodkind. Mr Goodkind establishes an amplified model of the struggle between good and evil. Heard this before? So what! The manner in which the book is written, produces characters who jump straight from the pages into your three dimensional imagination.Although the books are written to give an idea of prior volumes, it is a good idea to read this series in the correct order, to give yourself a full background, as the plots extend from one volume to the next. Overall, as an escape from day to day, as is science fiction's purpose, this series is wonderful. I've just finished the latest in the series "Faith of the Fallen", and can't wait for the next one. They just keep getting better.
Rating: 
Summary: Another lesson in cliche'.
Review: Where to begin, I could start where Mr. Goodkind started, in the "Big Book of Fantasy Cliches". It is books like this that remind me utterly of why I stopped reading Sci-Fi and fantasy novels when I was 14. I read the reviews, and the premise, seemed if not typical, somewhat promising, I could not have been in error more. Firstly, how many authors are attmepting desperately to be Tolkien? Each review of any work of this genre, is heralded as the new "Lord of the Rings", Goodkind is not Mr. Tolkien, not even close, he is sadly, a cookie cutter, book a year word mill, who churns out long predicatable stories with little insight. if verbosity is a virtue he has it, among few others. Secondly, aren't we getting sick of the woodsy, coming of age hero, and the myserious woman from another land schtick (please). The whole, I've got a secret, you've got a secret (OH NO!!), and the abominably tedious literary path to the eventual (and in this case dramatcally anti-climatic) revelation. The character's are poor at best, the villian incredibly...well, lame. Goodkind has come into the post-modern writing idea that a quirk makes a character. Furthermore, the old wizard, the witch in the swamp, the rough but likeable warrior, all drawn from the realms of "SEEN IT ALL BEFORE". The book is so predicatbly tiresome, that all the characters end up "ironically attached", to these "likeable" (more like annoying) people, one is overwhelmed by the sheer fatuity of the novel, that by the time the token Native Americans show up, one's eyes are too tired to roll anymore. Hmmm... Quirky but boring characters, the most blatant Tolkien rippoff of Gollum that has never been sued for liable, an all to evil and pointless villian out for world domination or destruction (whichever comes first), and a world with no basis for culture or country, one's gotta wonder, why people publish these books. Horrible I am further dismayed that many more trees will be ruined,or waste paper recycled and laboriously remade to print the 2nd and 3rd installmentof this very boring story. I'll spoil the end of the trilogy for you right now... The good guys win, and you won't care. A poor idea, set into hundreds and hundreds of pages, I finished out of sheer dedication to never leaving books unfinished, I'm going to burn my copy and hope Mr. Goodkind stops writing, he is niether clever, nor profound and his attempt to do so are tiring. If you didn't like this review you'll hate the book, because everyone you meet in this book lectures for pages and pages of things you already know. Trust me, if you've read any fantasy novels at all, you've read this book already, and chances are the books you read were better. P.S: This book stomps good taste and reason enough to create the single lamest thing I've ever seen, A red dragon , named Scarlet with a Southern drawl...no I'm not kidding. I hated this book and am returning to literature, vowing never to pick up any fantasy except Tolkien, and this to be read sparingly.
Rating:
Summary: You've got to be kidding
Review: This is truly a foolish novel. I'll admit that when I bought it, I was in the mood for some light escapism, but I purchased more than that for which I had bargained. The most obvious failing of the book is its stock characters, whose individuality is established only through the repetition of a limited repertoire of mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. The plot fares no better, being predictable, bland, and poorly executed. The sex and violence are gratuitous, distasteful, and two-dimensional, and I like a good kinky story more than the average Red-Blooded American Male. Those reviewers here who found it exciting or extreme really have lived sheltered lives. As copious as the sex and violence were, they usually did nothing to illuminate their actors. The book's tragic flaw is the theme, which is crippled by the lack of any coherent philosophy at all, even though philosophical expostition seems to be the pretentious primary ambition of the book's author. It appears to represent Goodkind's view of life and human nature as presented by the unimpeachably wise old wizard, whose first rule is that people are stupid,(excepting of course, the select few who agree with the author and his chief protagonists) i.e. "reason sucks, kids." Mr. Goodkind is certainly bedeviled by a pastiche of conflicting premises, which appear to have been garnered from a bowl full of fortune cookies containing trite aphorisms from various misguided Twentieth Century philosophies like Utilitarianism, Logical Positivism, Nietzscheanism, and Pragmatism. In short, his worldview is cynical, unrealistic, self-contradictory, and insulting to the intelligence. Time and again I watched him stumble headlong into a contradiction, get up, dust himself off, and pretend that nothing happened. One reviewer here accused him of "Commie bashing," which I will grant, he pays a bit of lip-service to the idea of individualism, but most of the book's incoherent theme is built upon collectivist premises. Indeed, his heroes are practically caricatures of the morally benighted Post-modern Liberal, and his world is an unintentional and dark metaphor for modern America. Another reviewer here complained that, "every character was trying to die, wanted to die, couldn't die, wished they could die, was trying to make someone else die..." to which I would add, such nihilism is the logical consequence of having such an unexamined, fragmented, and poorly understood moral structure, borrowed hodge-podge from bad philosophies. Read this book and you will find yourself wanting to join them.
Rating:
Summary: Not only a great series, an excellent book on its own!
Review: I have long been a fan of epic fantasy - Tolkien, Jordan, Weis & Hickman, and others. Though I have loved their books, you need (especially with Jordan) to read the whole trilogy or series before there is any sense of completion. With Wizard's First Rule (and to a lesser extent the other books in the series), Terry Goodkind sets up not only an excellent fantasy world and series, but creates an EXCELLENT book in its own right. I must have read this book at least 5 times now, and I enjoy it just as much (if not more) then the first time. If you liked any of the authors I listed above, then get this book now, you will not be disappointed!
Rating:
Summary: The most amazing book and series I have ever read.
Review: This is a great piece of work! The second I started I couldn't stop. I think I blew through all 6 books and the short story in record time. There is such character development and Goodkind's writing style is such that you feel as if you know these people. You are looking forward to their next discovery about not only the world they live in but about themselves. The books are fast moving and there is more action than you can ever think possible. When I finished the Wizards First Rule I felt as if I had just finished 3 seperate books. What you know in the first hundred pages is nothing compared to what you know in the last hundred pages. Think about what you will have seen by the last hundred pages of the 6th book! I have gotten my wife and her father into these books as well, they feel the same way. The only problem is now we are going to have to buy three copies of the 7th book because none of us are patient enough to wait our turn.
Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read for Fantasy Fans
Review: I was originally introduced to this book a couple years ago by an English teacher of mine who recommended it to me and even let me borrow her coveted paperback copy. By the time I had finished reading and rereading this book to absorb the material, I had worn the cover off of the poor dear from having dragged it all over the place with me. Like Tolkien's Silmarillion, once you plow into this novel, it becomes extremely difficult to stop. The storyline has everything a medieval romance fantasy requires -- the hero, the maiden, the powerful and good wizard, the evil tyrant and assorted lackeys, and, of course... the Magic Thingamajig (actually several of these, the Sword of Truth and Boxes of Orden most notably). The prose in this novel can seem tedious the first time through, as Goodkind has a tendency of taking his time fleshing out the literary landscape, but once you become accustomed to the style, it becomes a fairly natural read, as you come to appreciate the amount of detail you are immersed in. The point of the book comes in the journey itself and not in the destination, especially in the light of the fact that there are plenty of loose ends dangling and just waiting to drag you into the next book!
Rating:
Summary: wizard's first rule
Review: I have only read the first out of this 6 volume series, but it was quite a beginning. This book out of many fantasies I have read pulls off a truly despisable villain. You cheer for Richard and Kahlan(the main characters),but they don't seem fully defined. A terrible henchman and a fast paced plot adds the finishing touches to this exciting book. Won't let go.
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