The First Confessor

You can really tell Goodkind put his heart into this! This had me from start to finish!!!! However, the audio production wasn't that great. I liked the narrator just fine, but the editing was horrible. Sometimes sentences were repeated. Other times just the last word of sentence was repeated. If this is the quality FINE Group produces I don't want it. But I've read all of the entire Sword of Truth books via audiobook so if the next Magda book is done by FINE I'll suffer through it too.

After reading other books in the same world (Wizard's First Rule, Stone of Tears, etc.), I was happy to see this one on the shelf and have an opportunity to dive back in. The book promised a legend for the beginning. Goodkind again created characters to love and hate, but they felt more transparent and less real to me than characters in other stories. Even the talk of magic gets dull at times with references to star points and networks and connections. Something was missing from this story, and I'm not sure what it was.

I'd recommend this book to folks who already like the world of confessors and the sword of truth. It is interesting to have an origin story. Otherwise, skip it. There are plenty of great books out there.

Overall I really liked this book even though it has a lot of the same weaknesses as any of Terry's other books. He's got a point of view and there's no subtlety about the way he hammers it in. If someone were to do a word cloud on everything in this book “live”, “life”, “living”, and other similar words would be giant and everything else would be tiny. Not a bad philosophy, but I did get tired of having that point beaten in over and over.

One other very weird complaint... The chaptering in this book is kind of ridiculous. There's one sequence where Magda goes to visit a spiritist that takes at least 5 chapters when it would be more logically slotted into one. It's all one sequence of events and the way the chapters are broken up serve to falsely create cliffhanger moments that don't really work as such.

In any case, despite the heavy-handedness and the weird chaptering the story is really very good. It's much, much better than The Omen Machine and several books in the Sword of Truth series (I'm looking at you, Pillars of Creation).