As is the case with so many titles that are the middle stretch in a trilogy, this book suffers from being highly anticipated with a sense of trepidation at the fact that even before reading it you already have a good sense of the outcome, at least in broad general terms. An author who writes knowing, essentially in advance, that they are producing a trilogy must accept that certain plot points cannot be resolved by the end of book two though some others must be drawn further out.
With that said, I am not diminishing this book at all. Terry Brooks does a solid job in carrying the story that bridges the gap between his trilogy about the Word and the Void and the huge sweeping epic which is the Shannara realm. We get to see the story started with Armageddon's Children carried forward, with a great deal more involvement from the elves. As a reader of this entire mythology, the links start to take shape with this book--how we get from the world in which we human beings live in to the world that is the basis for the many Shannara stories that Brooks has told us over the past thirty years.
But alas, it is the middle book. Sometimes the middle story is the best but usually it just does not have the same magic as the beginning or the end.
I still hesitate in trying to imagine the breadth that the final book will have to have to really meld the two different universes together. As I mentioned in my review of the first book, the questions that come to mind have to do with those creatures that have not shown their faces yet...in partcular dwarves, trolls, druids...etc. Now I am sure that it will all be sorted out (and perhaps Terry has in mind yet another trilogy that will slide in between the first Shannara books and this set to give us even further detail) but I hope that the last book is not crammed to the rafters with a lot of unsubtle "glue" to bind it all together. Another way of putting that would be this: he completes the story of Hawk, Kirisin, Angel, Logan, and all the others, and then spends thirty pages spilling out the next one hundred years...how the dwarves boil up from the earth, how new magic was formed, etc. in such a way that it is just crammed in there. I have faith that Terry Brooks will avoid something like that, but you never know.
The trilogy still has, in my mind, a lot of promise, but I also have high expectations for the third book and hope that it will do justice to the idea of bringing these two different worlds together as one. Until I have the chance to read that book in another year I honestly cannot judge this series effectively. As it stands, as a single novel, this book is solid. It moves the story along, keeps you interested in the characters, and you can start to see how everything is going to start coming together in the end.
I liked the book, despite the "middle" book issues that I already mentioned. It has certainly whetted my apetite for the final chapter in this trilogy.