Kelly's review

You are not alone. Of the twenty some people I have met who liked this series, an overwhelming majority of them stopped on this book. I include myself in this number, and in you find another esteemed example.

I'm glad to find myself in such good company. Have you come up with any good explanations for the jaw-dropping shit that masqueraded as writing in this book? Maybe Goodkind met one too many adoring fans along the way and decided he didn't have to try anymore? That or he got so busy kissing his own ass that he couldn't see what he was typing properly. I just don't get how these books went down in quality so rapidly.

Well, I know a lot of us started reading them in our mid teens, and one's tastes start to change rapidly at that point, but there is real quality difference.

I know Goodkind has been quoted as saying he's 'not a fantasy author' but that his books are 're-inventing the novel', so he's clearly got some blindness as to his own writing quality.

Now only that, but the constant S&M fetishism he injects into his books gets less and less delicate as he goes along. We start out with lots of collars and professional torturers and move to magical enslavement by nipple removal and psychic blowjob rape.

I'm not sure if it's the fetishism itself that dropped the quality of writing and characterization, but it was clearly distracting him too much from the actual book/plot/character part of the writing.

It may also simply be that he ran out of steam at this point, as he had expressed most of the depth of his characters by this point, and since he didn't do anything to change them, there was really not much more for them to do besides narrowly miss one another and wear collars, which we'd already become tired of somewhat as his readers.

Yes, a lot of it probably had to do with growing up and getting more sophisticated in what constituted "good writing." I think that's part of it.

But I don't think its totally an illusion that they got worse. It wasn't just the fetishization. S&M stuff doesn't bother me- the Kushiel books are some of my favorites and their heroine is a champion for the female subs of the world in a lot of ways-, but I do agree that that was the only area that he seemed to care about anymore. We should have gotten more character development rather than more creatively weird sex play.

Maybe he knew how to set up the story, but didn't know how to do much more than that. He clearly overestimates himself (as the re-inventing the novel crap makes evident), so maybe he overestimated how much he could handle, too. Then he had this whole series, and had no idea what to do with it, and was left floundering and blustering and relying on sexy titillation to be enough to keep people interested. He did seem to be stalling for most of it, until he figured out something to do.

They say writers only have so many ideas in their lives. Clearly, he's used up all of his.