I know, this series hasn’t run its course. The third book, The Daylight War (according to Wikipedia), won’t be out for maybe a year or two and it’s unfair to review it now without taking in the work as a whole. Since I won’t be reading the final book, however, and I’ve gone as far as I ever wish to go in the series now is as good of a time as any to put in my two cents:

The first in the series, The Warded Man (its American title), is a really solid book. I enjoyed it immensely. There was a bit of action, a bit of drama, a bit of intrigue, and it was quite dark to boot—I thought it was the most promising start to a series I had read in a while. It wasn’t badly written, it had characters I could become attached to and it wasn’t even a total ripoff of something I had read before. Score!

The Desert Spear  was also pretty good. Maybe not as good as The Warded Man, but the middle novel of any trilogy usually is a bit of a letdown. Why then would I stop now, when the finale is bound to be something truly awesome (or at least tolerably readable)? Am I just a quitter?

It goes back to a disturbing trend which started in The Warded Man and only grew to be more disturbing as The Desert Spear ran on: every single important female character (as long as she is attractive) has been raped. Usually multiple times, and if not that it’s not for the lack of trying on the parts of the male characters. This isn’t in and of itself a reason to write off any book; clearly, I’m a fan of morbid plot twists and there can be legitimate reasons for horrible, even sexual, traumatic events being inflicted upon one’s character. A pattern is a little more disturbing, but maybe Peter V Brett just doesn’t have the money for a therapist. Or maybe he just has no idea what other trials and tribulations an attractive woman might have in her life, so to give his characters some depth he thinks throwing some rape in is just par the course.

I don’t really know what is going through this man’s mind, but this alone didn’t make me put down The Desert Spear in disgust. That wasn’t until the main female character, having been brutally gang-raped at the end of The Warded Man after years of “saving herself” for the right man, was told that being raped was really the best thing that could have happened to her because now she might not be such a frigid bitch. Popular opinion within the novel seems to be that as a very attractive woman she was doing a great disservice to the male population by not just spreading her godamn legs and taking it when she was good and pubescent.

This sounds really bad, and it is, but I continued because by and large the people saying this were characters the reader was really not supposed to agree with in the first place. So, I thought, maybe Brett is just making a point about the ridiculousness of this sort of rhetoric. There is no way he could actually think that she should just get over it and appreciate what these kind highwaymen have done for her, now they’ve opened her up to all of the amazing things a penis can bring to her life. So I kept reading. And reading. Not only is this never contradicted, but it becomes the belief of the character herself not as one may expect with undertones of self-loathing and anger but with a calm acceptance, as though this were the only possible way to deal with such a traumatic event, and never is this conclusion condemned by anyone, anywhere, in The Desert Spear.

I really don’t want to go into all of the ways in which this is fucked up on a colossal scale. I really hope I don’t have to. I think it would take a much longer essay to go into everything fucked up in The Desert Spear with regards to its female characters (I haven’t even gotten into the incest). Maybe feminist issues should have no bearing on what makes great literature—especially since many fantasy novels have at least a little fucked up chauvinism in them—but I think Peter Brett went too far, and even finishing the second book made me a little ill. Maybe he redeems himself with the next book, and I’m merely jumping to conclusions about the series’ final stance on women’s issues. But I wont spend any more of my life on books which only make me angry and ultimately depressed that these ideas haven’t been finally disregarded by people with common human decency.

I began Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series with high hopes. I had just finished the Song of Ice and Fire and was thirsting for more fantasy literature.My mother, an epic fantasy reader of old had only great things to say: “It’s really dark. I stopped reading at book five because it was just too, too intensely dark.” (Ok, so great things are relative).

It wasn’t until almost at the end of Eye of the World, after hundreds of pages of dull characters and mediocre, uninteresting and decidedly PG plot that I thought to call and ask my mother exactly what it was which made these books so morbid, and where exactly the epic anti-hero she had described to me was hiding. In my defense, with such an incredibly long fantasy book series it was reasonable to think that perhaps the first book would be devoted to this childish plot before characters would start developing seriously and hopefully start dying. My hopes of developing any interest at all in this epic, quintessential and much beloved series were dashed, however, when my mother told me that the Wheel of Time was in fact a supremely dull series which she had stopped reading at book eight when the books just kept getting longer and stupider, and why ever did I think she was talking about the Wheel of Time series when CLEARLY she was referring to the Thomas Covenant books.

Immediately, I set down the Eye of the World, deleted the whole series from my computer, and I really really doubt they will ever be picked up again. I’m sure that, in the fourteen or so heavy tomes Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson) has churned out over the decades there are moments of gold. I’m sure some of the characters I found so boring and useless in Eye of the World either die off or develop into useful and interesting characters. I posit, however, that it does not fucking matter. There are far too many better books and I have far too little time to read them to waste months on a series which, by all other accounts, loses focus and direction after book five or so while only increasing in size.

I guess the next step in my journey, then, is Thomas Covenant. I hope my mother has not led me astray.

I have loved fantasy books since I was a child, first learning to read on Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels and then more mundanely on R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps.

My tastes through the years evolved, but several years ago I found myself stagnating— even if my passion did not. Between school monopolizing my brain and time, and general life being given most of whatever is left, little of what remains has been devoted to reading for pleasure—particularly new untried series.

Call it a New Years’ Resolution, but I have been trying desperately to begin reading for fun again, and often I have an opinion—often a very strong opinion—on the latest book or series. Here, then are my opinions on these various books, presented mostly for myself but also for the benefit of others. If I can inspire someone to a particularly amazing book or warn of a really godawful series, I will consider myself a success.