'The Eye of the World' by Robert Jordan
'The Eye of the World' by Robert Jordan

The good

  • Lots of cool worldbuilding.

  • A number of interesting characters.

  • Some decent action scenes.

  • A fun, grand adventure.

The not so good

  • The first half feels like a copy of Lord of the Rings. A young hobbit boy is living life peacefully in a village with his friends; a mysterious wizard named Gandalf Moiraine suddenly shows up, as does a mysterious soldier named Aragon Lan (who turns out to be a king); the boy (armed with sword), his friends (one armed with an axe, one with a bow), the wizard, and the knight have to set off on a grand adventure across the country; they are stalked by wraiths fades, who dress all in black, hide their faces, and ride either black horses or huge flying winged beasts; they are chased by armies of orcs trollocs; there’s an evil, all powerful, fire-laden wizard named Sauron Shai’tan who is trying to take over the world; and so on. The second half of the book starts to do a bit of its own thing, but man, it’s hard to ignore those similarities. To be fair, many books follow this general trope (see: The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and the second half of the book starts to do more of its own thing, but still, it felt like this “borrowed” just a little too much from Tolkien.

  • There’s too much magic for my tastes, with no rules or limits on what the magic can do. As is always the case with magic-heavy stories, the result is a lot of Deus Ex Machina: when it’s convenient to the plot, the various wizards and magical entities always bust out with yet another magical ability, and when it’s not, they don’t, with no real explanation or logic to it.

Rating: 3.5 stars