The First Confessor

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).