I was introduced to Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series when a coworker gave me a copy of Wizard's First Rule as a gift last December. It wasn't until about March that I finally cracked it open and started reading it during my breaks. I spent the rest of the year plowing through it and its ten sequels.

What always kept me coming back for more, through the highs of the series' first half and the lows of its second, was the story of the two main characters, Richard Cypher - the quintessential "simple good guy" who grows as a warrior, leader and intellectual with each adventure, who more often defeats his enemies with his keen analytical mind over his physical brawn - and Kahlan Amnell - a woman of strength and authority that despite constant surrounding peril is no mere damsel-in-distress (even going as far as leading a war with sword in hand) who retains an emotional vulnerability that through Richard she becomes less afraid to show.

His villains by comparison are dull, but one of Goodkind's strengths is the way in which he introduces them. Darken Rahl, the series' first villain, isn't introduced until roughly a third into the 800+ page Wizard's First Rule, and his appearance is antithetical to the image his obvious villain name might suggest; the brutish, Genghis Kahn-like Emperor Jagang first appears in book three, and in Blofeld-like fashion makes only one appearance each for the next three novels, and not always in person (a trait relating to his specific magic power).

What Goodkind lacks in polish so far as prose and dialogue - his style is often feels amateurish and changes little through eleven books, and he gets quite long in the tooth when it comes to detailing the settings and strings of redundant dialogue - he makes up for in reader involvement. His heroes are intelligent but flawed people, and once he makes them firmly likable, he demonstrates absolute fearlessness in making them suffer, both physically and especially emotionally. So strong are his yanks on the heartstrings that a third-act turn of events in book four actually made me lose sleep for wanting to know what would happen next.

The author also shines in composing big, sweeping action sequences, adeptly going back and forth between choreographing individual swings of axes and swords, and offering broader views of widespread carnage as it unfolds, and in this he does show improvement as the series presses on. Of further intrigue is the way in which the world of magic is presented; early on, little of its nature is made evident outside of things like conjured fire and lightning and repeated mentions of prophecy, but especially in later books, the study of more complex magic feels akin to advanced science and mathematics, while its execution comes in the form of painting or sculpture, and I found that very interesting.

It's about at the halfway point of the series that it began to lose me. Something I didn't know going in was that Terry Goodkind loves Ayn Rand. A lot. But it becomes all to evident by the end of book six, Faith of the Fallen, which, while remaining my third favorite of the series, is essentially a gushing love letter to The Fountainhead. If book six had been the only one to do this, I wouldn't mind nearly as much, as it does touch on a few resonant themes of rising above a zealotry-oppressed collective (perhaps the merging of Randian philosophy with a fantasy setting helped me in this regard) and ends on a memorable high note.

Unfortunately, it's from that point on that Goodkind forgoes developing his characters any further and instead turns them into mouthpieces for preachy Objectivist rhetoric, culminating in Richard delivering the longest of long-winded diatribes to the enemy at the conclusion of book eleven. It gets real old real fast, and only more so if you're of the mind that Ayn Rand was a kook. It came to a point several times I wanted to slam the book on the table and shout, "Okay, Terry, we get it, you love Rand, and Rand hated Jesus and Communism. MOVE ON ALREADY." I mean, homage is one thing, but this is more like he's having noisy sex with her in the next room and pounding on the wall just so you're sure who it is.

The last half of the series is by no means a total waste, as there are a number of genuinely moving, thrilling moments, particularly in the "Chainfire Trilogy" (books nine through eleven), but the tarnish of the overblown philosophical ramblings is still there, thus the pure joy of reading the series had effectively died out for me, despite the prevalent desire to see how it all played out in the end.

Additionally, Goodkind's own consistent pacing structure fails him in book eleven - each novel allows events to play out at a steady, measured pace, before the final seventy or so pages explode with action as all the pieces finally fit together, and this works with the sole exception of Confessor, wherein the wealth of simultaneous plot threads and connections between events of all eleven books, plus the cumulative gravity of the situation as set up over the previous two books, result in a rushed, inauspicious anticlimax.

Rating the series:

Wizard's First Rule (8/10) - Prime introduction to the world of magic.
Stone of Tears (9/10) - Raises the stakes as any good sequel should.
Blood of the Fold (7/10) - Suffers from prolonged separation from most of the principal cast, but ends with the series' first really great battle sequence.
Temple of the Winds (8/10) - Might have been a 7 due to certain predictable factors, had it not been for the INSANE emotional gutpunch toward the end, followed by a well-deserved happy ending.
Soul of the Fire (5/10) - Boring antagonists, uninvolving conflict, downer conclusion.
Faith of the Fallen (8/10) - Shines despite starting in on the Randian overload.
The Pillars of Creation (6/10) - Takes a bold creative direction from which it ultimately suffers. How bold? Richard and Kahlan don't even appear until the tail end of the book.
Naked Empire (4/10) - Again, boring antagonists, plus annoying protagonists. Basically a hate letter to pacifists. Goodkind might as well have called it "Lecturing to Idiots".
Debt of Bones (7/10) - A brief 100-page novella detailing some backstory that doesn't bring a whole lot to the proceedings, but does shed a bit of light on a major character's past.
Chainfire/Phantom/Confessor (7/10) - All over the place, representing all the highs of the first half and the lows of the second. Makes a valiant attempt to tie the whole series together and bring it full circle, but does so in highly convoluted fashion with a letdown of a resolution.

There is actually one additional book in the series, 2011's The Omen Machine, but given the conclusion of Confessor, which really does end the story arc of the series beginning with Wizard's First Rule, and the overall decline in quality starting with The Pillars of Creation, I felt no pressing need to push on.

All this said, the first half of the series is really where it's at. Wizard's First Rule and its immediate sequel Stone of Tears are two of the most satisfying reading experiences of my adult life, no matter that Terry Goodkind's storytelling is about as subtle as it is original (one recurring character in particular might as well have been named Gollum for all the similarities he bears), and I would love - LOVE - to see at least the first two books properly adapted to film.