Terry Goodkind is one fantasy author that I’m all-too-familiar with. I’ve watched THE LEGEND OF THE SEEKER series and have read most of his books about Richard Rahl and the rest of the characters. So, when given the opportunity to read THE LAW OF NINES, I was curious to see what Goodkind would do with a modern tale.

THE LAW OF NINES is fascinating to me in a lot of ways, because this wasn’t a story that I had expected to read. For starters, this is a lot grittier and darker than some of his other books because it is set in our world – a world with no magic. Although strange things do happen, Goodkind’s emphasis is on the “cost” of how characters might react to these reality-bending occurrences. The results, while not pretty, are wholly believable and help maintain great tension throughout most of the book.

It is a story of Richard Cypher, a woodsman in a village of the Westland. To him magic was a myth or a legend and he never thought of it more than an afterthought. Then he stumbled across a woman dressed in white named Kahlan and everything in his world changed instantly. He finds out he is the Seeker of legend and he must cross the boundry to fight the evil Darken Rahl.

The good and bad thing about fantasy is that there is a very true formula for how the story is written. It is good because when someone that can truly write gets a hold of it, it can be a magical thing indeed. It is bad because of how predictiable the story can be sometimes. This book had both the good and bad of that equation.

Review by Stacey Chancellor