Rating: 
Summary: Graet Read
Review: If I could only begin to tell you how much I loved this book. I am very much looking forward to the next book. The characters are great and well thought out. It's written perfectly. I could not have been any happier with it. Try it! You will love it too!
Rating: 
Summary: What happened at Del Rey?
Review: This was the WORST insult to my intelligence as a reader I have ever experienced. The author (or editor) apparently didn't notice the unending repetition, or the obvious timeline mistakes that occurred. All authors who use prophecy as a vehicle of suspense and plot find they have to deal with the problem of revealing too much while still giving the reader a sense of foreshadowing. The prophecy in this book pretty much just told whatever was going on in very clear terms. However, the weak prophecy wasn't the worst thing about the book. The sex was too goofy to be fun. Look, I'm anti-NOW and have done my share of annoying the irreligious left...but even I was a little bothered by the utter depravity of the women in this book. I want to be clear here. I wasn't bothered by the fact that women were the villains and men the good guys, and neither was my wife. It was more that the women were HORNY villains. If Terry Goodkind went over the top, this guy went to the moon! I mean heck, GOOD women don't put out that much. It rather throws me that BAD women would be so accomodating! But I digress... What really got my goat though, was the leaps in logic taken by various characters and the acceptance of these leaps. To keep this from giving any spoilers, I'll make it deliberately vague... At one point there's a bloody attack on the good guys. The good guys knew or suspected that the attack was going to come and also knew that they would be completely vulnerable. But, as it is explained to the hero later, they could not move their get-together to another location or beef up the guards or warn anyone because well...they just couldn't. I mean, the explanation really made no sense. And on it went through several more situations that were just so unbelievably contrived that I felt actually insulted. I cannot explain adequately the mind-boggling lack of explanation for anything that happened in this book. Also, a final word of advice to the author: Show me don't tell me! P.S. The author seems to have taken a page from Terry Goodkind...it's worse than his first novel. Do NOT pick this up thinking you're getting Jordan. He's much more like Goodkind, but without the wonderful philosophical statements that Goodkind does so well (His strong point in my mind).
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down!
Review: I loved it! I'm new to fantasy, so I guess I'm not as critical as a lot of the reviewers have been. I had a lot of trouble trying to tear myself away from the book. I am really looking forward to the sequel.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty good but no Terry Goodkind
Review: I liked the book and plan to buy Newcomb's next. It's fairly clear from the first two chapters that he's planned a sequel (or more.)and the first third of the book reads more like a prequel. Frankly, reading this reminded me of reading Robert Jordan's Eye of the World: I looked forward to the continuing story and further character development. There's enough originality to look forward to the next book but not enough for the heart-racing excitement and man versus himself genius of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. So if you like Jordan, you'll like this but don't expect The Wizard's First Rule.
Rating:
Summary: Bad, bad, bad
Review: This was TERRIBLE!
This was simply an awful book. The storyline was a bit mediocre with Good/Male and Evil/Women with no gray area at all. Clear cut and simple. The writing was atrocious with repetitions and cliches. Cliches of bumper sticker origin. Here is an example, a quote straight out of the book, "A bastard quotation from somewhere in his past suddenly came to mind: LEAVE ONLY FOOTPRINTS. TAKE ONLY MEMORIES." I had to laugh at this. He must have been writing this passage while visiting a national park. It goes on and on with a neverending succession of blandness and bumper sticker cliches. Save money and time and pass this one up.
Rating:
Summary: Really bad
Review: Others have thoroughly dissected this book, so I won't repeat their criticisms (thin characterizations, windy prose, cliched plot elements, "As you know, Bob" infodumps, unbelievable plot twists...etc.). Instead, I'll reduce the book's basic problems to two examples: In the book's first paragraph, a ship is struggling across a "brackish" ocean. Does Newcomb (or his copyeditor) perhaps not know what "brackish" means? Or are they unaware that oceans are salt? Bad, bad, very bad, and it's just the first of many examples of this sort of thing. A few pages later a GIANT PLOT HOLE occurs. A GIANT PLOT HOLE just eight pages into a novel is not a good thing, especially when it's so transparently a device to make the rest of the plot possible. Specifically: four wretchedly evil sorceresses have wreaked hideous and perverted havoc in an effort to Rule the World, leaving the land a shambles. The (magnanimously good) wizards have finally captured them. Now, the wizards obviously need to get rid of the sorceresses, so they can't wreak more hideous and perverted havoc; but if they killed them (as would be logical) there wouldn't be a series. So the author comes up with the notion of wizardly oaths that prohibit killing except in "urgent self-defense"; planned execution therefore would be murder, as would life imprisonment, which would entail starving the sorceresses to keep their powers in check and therefore result in their death by weakness or disease (boo hoo). So the wizards' only option is...banishing the sorceresses into the Unknown--which they do, apparently completely overlooking the fact that in fantasy novels, the Unknown always turns out to contain unpleasant surprises that precipitate unforeseen results (in this case, the fact that the sorceresses survive--something the astute reader will already have guessed by the fact that 580 pages of text remain). Now, epic fantasy novels obviously don't take place in the real world. But they must reflect real world values; they can't completely deny the rules of logic and common sense. In Real World terms, you can bet the wizards would have executed the sorceresses, oaths or no--maybe secretly, maybe with guilt or regret; maybe they even would have suffered for doing so. But they would have done it, because it was necessary, logical, and human. However, in that case...there would be no series. Hence, the GIANT PLOT HOLE that yawns open on page 8. This entire series is based on a completely implausible premise. Unlike others, it really doesn't bother me that most of the female characters are evil and lascivious--I don't think it's sexism at work, but rather the fantasies of a guy who's into the whole S&M dominatrix thing. Long fingernails! Shiny boots! Whips and chains! Whoo-hoo! What's disappointing is that though there's lots of reference to sexual depravity and many scenes where we are told the sorceresses are being depraved, there's actually NO GOOD SEX in this book!!! I felt really cheated. For a much better execution of this sort of theme, check out Jacqueline Carey's KUSHIEL series (not that I'm in any way comparing the KUSHIEL books, which are beautifully written, plotted, and characterized, to this monstrosity) or Anne Bishop's BLACK JEWELS series (also a much better set of books). The book does present a fairly interesting magic system, but unfortunately it does so mostly through the abovementioned "As you know, Bob" infodumps, which make for very plodding reading. Last: I find it interesting that this book has generated such animus. Badly written, poorly conceived fantasy isn't all that uncommon, and many people love it, as evidenced by the sales figures of writers like...never mind, I won't go there. I suspect that if this book had been released with less hype it might not have produced such hostile reactions. H.L. Mencken said, "No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." Sometimes that isn't as true as cynics like to think it is. Sometimes people do know a turkey when it's plonked on their plates.
Rating:
Summary: I Liked it....
Review: I just wanted to put in a review to help offset the low reviews, Each to their own opinion. But , I have read a large number of "fantasy" books and I thought this one was up at the top among some of the best. But as I mentioned each to their own. Remember no opinion really matters but your own.
Rating:
Summary: Stinko, stinkere, stinki
Review: I really can't add much to the correctly outraged reviews that have already been posted to this site. This books stinks to high heaven. It might not be so obvious if it had come appropriately into the marketplace, with good blurbs and such, but the hoopla, the hozannahs and the banner proclaiming it "THE EPIC FANTASY OF THE YEAR" set the bar WAY too high for any but the best of books to attain, and this is FAR from being the best of books. Del Rey should be ashamed for not only overblowing the horn on this book, but for publishing such a sexist piece of poorly written drivel in the first place.
Rating:
Summary: How did this ever get published?
Review: I have read about one-third of this book, and I doubt that I will finish it. This tops "The Eye of Argon" for being laughably bad. Do I have to give it one star? It was totally incompetent, unoriginal, unbelievable, and just plain embarrassing. Even for a politically-incorrect reader, the gender stereotypes were annoying and preposterous. Lots of unnecessary violence, grossness, and badly-described meaningless sex. About the best thing I can say for this book is that most of the words were spelled correctly. Fortunately, I didn't *buy* this book. The only reason I have it is that (at one time) it was available for free, as a sample download for the PalmReader. But it's not even worth downloading for free. Save your money, and save your time. (Go buy something by Robin Hobb or Steven Brust.)
Rating:
Summary: I am soooo angry
Review: Why isn't there an option for zero stars. My thoughts would echo a few of the articulate negative reviews below. I have only a couple additions. The constant shifting of point of view character - sometimes alternating line-by-line in the same paragraph is extremely annoying and makes it a difficult read. I would add that it hinders characterization, but the characters are all stock stereotypes, so no characterization is needed. Problem solved. Then we have the death enchantments. Did anyone notice that early in the book Tristan proclaims that the women should be subjected to death enchantments several pages BEFORE he hears the term "death enchantments" for the first time??? Where in the name of all that is holy was the editor? This is the point where I really got angry. I can accept - grudgingly - paying good money for a book with weak writing, but I expect, nay - demand - a well edited book when it comes from a big-name publisher. The "info-dumping" technique, as someone called it, is crafty when you're in sixth grade, but a novel simply MUST find a better way. Having one character sit down and ask another a string of questions - many about things he would already know - is not how it's done. You have hundreds of thousands of words to work with. Be creative. They call it "creative writing." Sigh. I suppose if I actually finished the book I could come up with more complaints. I'm just fearful of going apoplectic if I run into another one of those editing SNAFUs. If you insist on reading this book, wait for the paperback and only waste a third of the cash.
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