In the meantime Padishar gets caught in a rescue attempt of his daughter, Damson. Damson sets off to rescue him while Par sets off to discover why his long-thought dead brother has appeared again. Morgan sets off to help Padishar as well and meets up with Matty Roh - one of Padishar's spies.

Wren is discovering the difficulties of being a queen with an army marching to their front door.

I liked most of the book. The only reason it received a 4 instead of a 5 was because the flow stuttered a few times. What I liked the most were the character portrayals. Most of them were excellent. All in all the book was excellent and I was left wanting more of Brooks. I do have most of his books and they are all fairly good. Enjoy this one.

WHAT'S GOOD:
As ever, Cogline is an excellent character, combining the Druid wisdom with an accessible down-to-earth quality. Cogline's strengths are shared and expanded upon by Walker Boh, the series' best character overall. The storyline featuring Walker's efforts is by far the most compelling.

WHAT'S BAD:
The story threads involving Par, Coll and Morgan are not only tedious, but repetetive. Twice more we have to read reams about the characters wandering through Tyrsis' sewers (which I'd had enough of in the first book). No fewer than five time, main characters are captured and have to rescued, each time not so far removed from the previous plotline. The Elven defence of the Westland would have been good if not for the fact that Brooks has now written the same sort of battle (overwhelming odds, guerrila warfare, deus ex machina) several times throughout the Shannara series. Finally, Par Ohmsford is the single stupidest human being ever to feature in a book. You won't be tense because of his plight, but rather because of the desire to throttle him! An evil murdering man tells you things, do you a) believe him and accept him as a friend or b) refuse to accept anything the manipulative liar tells you? Can you figure it out? Par can't.

In "The Elfqueen" it went on way too long and I got bored with Wren and was dying to know what had happenned to the other characters, especially Walker. At some points during the journey through Morrowindl, I got so bored that I wanted to stop reading. By the end, however, the events had speeded up, and I found myself hooked once more.

In "The Druid" I felt that the story line was strung out over too many pages, and they spent way way too long doing almost nothing in Eldwist. Also, the characterisation of Walker and Morgan was a little low. The Morgan - Quickening match just does not work because we do mot hear enough ot Quickening's views on it, and because we have no proof that Morgan feels any different to everyone else Quickening meets.

This book was undoubtedly the best, because it told you what was happenning to all the characters. By the end of "The Elf Queen" I had fallen in love with Walker Boh! He is perfect in every way, and it was easy to relate to his fear and understand exactly how he feels about the Druids. I think everything he did was right, and that he is by far the best character I have ever read about.

Overall, this was a brilliant book.

Feel free to email me about it!