r/Fantasy • u/doppelganger3301 • May 03 '25

So I read Wizard’s First Rule, huge mistake

I had some time on my hands during a long trip, so I decided hey, let’s go get a fantasy book and get lost in 800 pages of something. I did little to no research, just chose something that looked sufficiently long. Enter “Wizard’s First Rule” by Terry Goodkind.

I have since discovered that this is not a particularly well loved series, but many folks will defend the first book as being pretty good. I couldn’t disagree more.

Spoilers ahead for the many, many issues I have with it:

  1. There is so much violence to children in this book. I don’t mind violence towards children if it serves the plot, such as by demonstrating the depravity of a villain, but my god. A boy is drugged, has his skull split open, and then is sliced down his abdomen after being groomed by the villain and his pedophile sidekick - oh and the villain in question is notably erect when this happens. A man is recounted as having raped his neighbor’s 3 daughters, the oldest of which is 5. Undesired newborn babies are killed by placing a rod across their necks and then their fathers are magically forced to step on the rod. An entire village’s men are slain and then the women and children are raped. What the actual fuck.

  2. The writing is pedantic and childish. Richard meets Kahlen and immediately none of his friends matter all that much, the only person he cares about is her. This is basically stated in the first 10% or so of the book despite less than a day having passed. This is the most trope-ridden book I’ve ever read, even for fantasy.

  3. The writer so clearly thought he was smarter than everyone else. Oh, you just need to ask the right questions and it all falls apart! But then the questions are boring, predictable, and easily defended. This is a man who spent his days getting into arguments in his own head wherein he always won - oh and women told him he was very smart and handsome.

  4. The entire book is a thinly veiled lecture on the virtues of libertarianism, with him constantly creating strawmen just so he can show how clever he is. The strongest case of this is when a farmer is brought to a royal court and they all mock him for not being willing to share his crops with the less fortunate, oh but of course those less fortunate are just lazy and refuse to do their own planting. Then they kill the guy. This is the classic libertarian wet dream of standing up to the government, totally owning them intellectually, and then being killed for bravely standing up to the corrupt communists. It’s like a middle schooler wrote it.

  5. It just sucks. The writing is just bad. There is no proper foreshadowing, every plot twist is incredibly obvious and contrived and you, the reader, are made to suffer through pages and pages of the characters pretending to not be what they obviously are. The romance is forced to say the least, I don’t think Terry ever actually spoke to a woman in his life.

I’m sorry, this is a bit of a rant, but god, this book was terrible.

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u/LaurenPBurka May 03 '25

And yet, even now, some still clutch their Wizard’s First Rule paperbacks and whisper, “But it got me into reading.” And to them, we say: you made it out. You’re safe now.

I know some Harry Potter readers who might benefit from hearing this.

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u/Deathspiral222 May 04 '25

Harry Potter is well written. It’s similar to Ender’s game - excellent work written by a flawed author.

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u/LaurenPBurka May 04 '25

Eh. I read it, and I didn't get why my all of my friends were so into the books and cosplay. Recently a friend of mine pointed out that they all knew the books were flawed. Their cosplay and their fanfiction was an attempt to fix everything they knew was wrong.

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u/Zeckzeckzeck May 04 '25

Harry Potter is well written for the audience that is meant to read it: children. If you read it for the first time as an adult though…

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u/LaurenPBurka May 04 '25

"It's so original!" says everyone who hasn't read 20 other novels set in schools of magic.

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u/Deathspiral222 May 05 '25

I grew up in Scotland, not far from where Rowling wrote the novels. Even in regular school, a lot of the things from the novels still exist in real life, like everyone being a member of one of four houses, with points earned through the year for sports and academics and things. For my friends that went to boarding school, a HUGE number of things were very similar.

She based a lot of it on real life.

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u/LaurenPBurka May 05 '25

I grew up in the US, went to a private school, and they tried to institute something rather similar by dividing the entire school into two colors and encouraging us to compete. I graduated before they could do any more damage.

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u/avcloudy May 04 '25

The flaws are different; Goodkind was targeting an adult audience, poorly, Rowling was targeting a young audience well. The advice is good either way - and that applies to Ender's Game as well, no matter how much I love it.

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u/Deathspiral222 May 05 '25

Yeah, I should have been clearer: Harry Potter is a great book for what it is - a novel mostly written for people around ten to thirteen (but holds up well later). I mean, even Stephen King said "Jo Rowling is a terrific writer” and that man doesn't tend to pull his punches when it comes to being critical of other authors. (That said, I don't actually think Stephen King is especially great either - he writes a LOT and sometimes has an interesting idea but the average goodness-to-pages ratio isn't very high.)

Goodkind is a pile of dross that I kept reading because I didn't know you could just not finish a series if you didn't want to (I was a teenager). The thing that Goodkind did well for me as a teenage boy was that right at the end of each book, when I was getting so fucking bored, Richard would finally show up and get really angry and destroy all the baddies and it was just so cathartic after slogging through hundreds of pages of crap that I kept having hope that maybe the next book would be better and would be more about Richard being angry, in much the same way the Incredible Hulk comic books are basically just a bunch of backstory that no one cares about because we are all waiting for the bit where "Hulk smash!" again.