The Pillars of Creation

This was a re-read for me. I first read the series years ago, probably over 20yrs ago now and fell in low with these books. I loved the charactes, story etc.. mainly because it really aligned with my personal world view at the time

However over the yrs that has evolved, and I have started to understand why people dislike this series so much and to be honest this is probably the worst of the books.

This book introduces 2 new characters, Oba and Jensen Rahl, children of Darken Rahl that are supremely ungifted and the gifted are blind to them in the sense they cannot sense them with their gift and thus they are immune to magic

Both had very different upbringings resulting in very different character traits which this book constrast quite well very much expressing the idea of nature vs nurture.

However this book did not need 700+ pages to tell their story, and could have easily been done as a novella or short story. It just did not or should not have taken so much page time for essentially a side quest to explore these ideas. Many of the other charactes who are supporting or main roles in the overall story make virtually no appearence, and when they do some felt way out of place or even character from how they were established in the previous books of the series. Overall this is just not a good book overall. I give it 2.5 stars as I still like the series overall, if not as much as I used to