Book Review: Armageddon's Children / The Elves of Cintra

The Genesis of Shannara series by Terry Brooks

Armageddon's Children (Book 1)
The Elves of Cintra (Book 2)

Rating: 2/5 (both books)
Recommended: Not really.

Warning: While I will try not to 'spoil' things too badly, I do discuss plot points. So read at your own risk.

Within the first twelve pages (I know this because I turned to Jonathan while I was on page 12) I had been hit with some heavy-handed, loaded exposition that mostly made me go "O...kay then." I didn't realize that Brooks is essentially linking two of his worlds together in this series, as it's "The Genesis of Shannara" series that talks about "The Word and the Void".

I read the Shannara series when I was younger, and I only read them once because after a while I started to pick out the same characters, the same plot threads, from one series to the next. He likes to follow a family through the ages, and I found that Billy (not a real character) was exactly the same as his great-grandfather Bob (again, not a real character, I'm just trying to make a point here).

Having glanced over summaries of his "The Word and the Void" trilogy, I now see that Armageddon's Children would make more sense if one had read the other trilogy beforehand. Honestly? I'm not inclined to do so. I'll give Brooks credit for one thing, he's a good writer. I can't complain about his prose style. His characters? I didn't see anything original. It's a post-apocalyptic society, ok, so we've got the rag-tag group of street-wise kids living on their own, the jaded old warrior driven by revenge until he realizes that revenge means nothing, the fierce female warrior who's independent and driven... Yeah. Also, the reveal of the Big Bad a few chapters in was played up huge because he's apparently a character in the earlier series.

And there's magic in the world, did you know? The reason we don't know about it is because the elves went into seclusion because they were being out-propagated by the humans. <-- That's about how it's given to you in the book too.

The Elves of Cintra, Book 2, is not that much better in my opinion. There appear to be two or three main "character groups" in each book, with characters sometimes shifting groups and a different group getting the most attention in an individual book.

So in this case, different characters get the spotlight from "Armageddon's Children". I suppose that's all right, though I didn't really see the difference from Book 1 to Book 2. The major plot point is "someone is secretly a Demon!" and it's ... not handled well. The reveal is typical Evil Genius Explains Everything.

We also get to learn more about the Individual Ragtag Children that we saw in the first book. Nothing I haven't seen before, nothing that really makes me say "Wow!" or "What an awesome book!"

I'll finish the series out of habit, but I won't reread it.