Debt of Bones

Terry Goodkind has always been stronger on visionary description than on explanation: Debt of Bones goes back to a time before the realms of The...more

Terry Goodkind has always been stronger on visionary description than on explanation: Debt of Bones goes back to a time before the realms of The Sword of Truth were sundered by deadly barriers to explain much of what we have seen. At the same time, it is a moving human story rather than an appendix to larger texts; Abby, the young mother desperate to save her child, is placed in an impossible dilemma, and Goodkind is fascinated by the process whereby she comes to her eventual decision. He also shows us a younger, brasher, fiercer Zedd than the wise old sage we meet in the other novels, a man who has not yet formulated his devastatingly tough-minded instincts into a set of misleading proverbs. This impressive, tightly-driven novella is full of ingenious retro-fitting of information we already know the outcome of; we know that some of the decisions taken here will have consequences of which the characters cannot imagine and we find ourselves all the more torn by their dilemmas because of it. Anyone who has been moved and delighted by Goodkind's sequence cannot avoid reading this book, not just for its explanations but for its ruthless yet loving portrait of a group of flawed human beings trying to do the closest thing possible to the right thing. --Roz Kaveney   less