A mysterious magic user petitions a simple farming person to help save the world from the powers of darkness.

Where have I heard this story line before?

Anyhow, parts of the book were well-written, but that first line up there was just the first in many instances of what seemed to be direct rip-offs of one very famous fantasy trilogy which this author admits was a big influence on him deciding to become a writer. Witness, for example, the third book in the trilogy - in which the heroine must take a powerful magical artifact and hurl it into a river of fire in order to destroy it.

Yes. Seriously.

Almost every element of the trilogy has some parallel from that famous trilogy, which is a shame, because the first several chapters of the Shannara trilogy started out pretty great and roped me in.

The biggest difference is that LOTR's Gandolf was kind of a bad ass. And the Shannara parallel (the druid Allanon) is a total dick.

Spoiler: Every book starts out with Allanon telling a Hobbit-parallel character about some mission they need to go on.

Allanon pretty much can foresee the future, but he withholds information from the lead character because he's afraid that the Hobbit clone won't go on this quest if he reveals too much.

So they go off, solve their quest, and then something horrible happens to them - like their sister dies or their mother is raped by ice goblins or something - and then Allanon shrugs his shoulders and says "Ya, but you saved the world. So that's pretty awesome, right?"

I hate Allanon.