Chainfire Book Review
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Sword of Truth enters another arc known as Chain fire. The series has come a long way for the better or worse. Fortunately, Chainfire comes off as much more readable to me than many of the other books in the series so far. Let’s discuss why.
To start, the series separates out Richard and Kahlan. This is important because this ends up being the entire plot for the entire trilogy of books that are in the pipeline to be told. I do wish that Terry Goodkind had brought us into the story a little differently. But I suppose when you are trying to make it seem as if the characters have lost memory that this was the easiest good way to do it.
The book starts out in the aftermath of an action sequence where Richard is mortally wounded and only by a miracle of Nicci’s negative magic, is he able to be saved.
This throws a curveball at the readers as here are now multiple possibilities to explain why Kahlan has essentially been wiped from the conscious and the any other forms of memory as she currently was.
Richard being the way that he is written is as insufferable of a know it all as ever and absolutely refuses to listen to everyone around him. This goes on and on through a good chunk of the book.
The story does finally begin to write out a conclusion to the series that was started to be told WAY back in book 3. I just wish that there was just more meaningful content to fill many of the books between this one and the 3rd book. The 3rd book still must be one of the weakest arc introductions I have ever been exposed to in fantasy.
So again this fact that there is meaningful story progression and promise of more continuation to follow is probably why these books are slightly higher up in my ratings for the entire series than others.
The concept of Chainfire in the book though is pretty lazy and could have been executed better is still much more interesting than the rest of what the series has been able to offer up to this point.
There is not much for character growth in this book. All the characters here are stuck in their ways and should not be expected to change at all at this point. For Richard this is extra sad. Since he is the main character and his growth ended after the second book in the series after claiming the throne of being Lord Rahl.
Richard is not a main character I can get behind and root for, nor is he a character that I can root against. He is just a bad guy painted to be a good guy. His reasons that he has for everything are unfounded, but he still expects everyone to listen to him because he knows best and is never wrong.
At the end of the day. If I was rating this book on character development, it would be at the bottom. It gives us some fan service that I am sure people were asking for between Richard and the rest of his ladies around him. This is the opposite direction that it seemed all the characters were going based on the past books in the series. This isn’t high school. This is just a really shitty series.
If it comes down to original content, I would be willing to say it was slightly better than the rest of the series as the concept was enjoyable, just not executed in the best way.
I feel that if you have made it this far through the series, then you will be very happy with this book and is worth your time to read. However, if you are just reading my reviews, I still highly recommend you stay away from the series as a whole.
The Sword of Truth series will continue onward with the next installation of Phantom. I likely will be ending the Sword of Truth series reviews once completed with the Confessor book which is the last in this arc.
If you want to see where this book ranks in the original series, you can find our Ranking the Sword of Truth series article here!
