Fantastic
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So far I am only on book 5 in the series but I have to say that this is the best so far.
I was so absorbed with the story within the story that I was devastated (metaphorically) when it was over and it went back to the main story.
Kings imagination is incredible and the way he has brough characters in from his other books is amazing, its even more epic in scope than I realised when I started the series and leads me to wonder if this was his plan all along to create and complete masterpiece interwoven with many of his other books.
A fully enjoyable read
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My but this was boring!
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You can actually skip most of this book without missing anything too important. King has already long since explained exactly what happens to Susan at the end, just in case you didnt pick up on it he helpfully spells it out yet again in this tale so youre really just waiting for it to happen.
The flashback which takes up most of the book focuses intently on young Rolands boring romance with Susan Delgado whos place as village beauty is so unquestioned as to make her virtually a cipher.
It would help to flesh the characters out if any of the 1000's of words King uses to describe their relationships tedious encounters explained in any way why they liked eachother so much. "If you love me then love me!" No, not this time? Oh well, maybe a few dozen more pages mithering over it and arranging how to set up another meeting by hanging towels out of windows and passing notes around through intermediaries will do it, and why dont we just make the readers endure every single event.
Susan is young and blonde and beautiful, Roland is handsome and brooding and... have you fallen asleep yet? I almost did - to be fair King does capture the vain single mindedness of teenage love quite well. Its just a shame he doesnt recognise that the heights of obsession teenage romance displays is every bit as tedious for onlookers as it is overwhelming for those caught up in it. By the end of this work I was simply sick of Susan crying, Roland pining, his friends brooding and wondering cluelessly what was going on.
My main problem was the complete waste of opportunity. When you think about the excellent prequel short story King wrote for Everythings Eventual it really seems such a waste that he chose to pour so much porridge intho his flashback tale in the DT series. It would have been incredible to have found out how Gilead fell, what happened on Jericho Hill and who the Good Man was, but instead we're forced to endure page after page about how Susan and Roland passed messages to one another by writing on bricks. What a shame.
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Wizard and Glass
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This book has a big fat disappointment nestling in it. I'm hoping that, if I tell you about it now, you will enjoy it a little more than I did, and perhaps give it the four stars it really deserves rather than the three I've settled with.
This is a flash-back novel. It's not a bad thing in itself, but when you've read the first three instalments and left on a cliff hanger, you'd better hope that the momentum keeps up! It does - we get the resolution of the story segment truncated in "The Waste Lands", and it's a good one too. We get a little more as well. And then we get about five hundred pages of flashback, returning to Roland's youth and his - don't get me wrong - very interesting adventures. But these aren't the characters we've come to invest our hopes and emotions in; it's barely even the same Roland, the period of time between them is so great. So you're not reading Dark Tower 4, you're reading that tie-in novel that you probably would have picked up anyway, provided it's second-hand and in good condition. King shamefully weaves it into the fourth novel - or more accurately, plonks it right in the middle - so that the frame of the story, in which the adventures of Roland, Odetta (or Suzanna), Eddie and Jake continue, is something that we have to read so that we're not missing stuff. Really, he should have put the opening on the end of the last book, and the ending on the start of the next, and let us in on the secret that this is not entirely relevant to the story we're reading. It's like cruising at 90mph only to have to take a little detour around a school at 20mph before you can start picking up speed again.
Don't misunderstand - it's a good book. It's worth reading. But it feels a little like filler and doesn't have enough of the characters we really want. Should you buy it after completing "The Waste Lands"? Of course you should! It's great! Just be forewarned that this is a different story to the one you've been reading, and the main characters, the one's you're really interested in, take a back seat to Roland's back story.
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Wow
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What ever people say about this book being bad in any way. They are completly wrong, its a masterfully beautifull book by itself. It doesnt loose the plot at all. This is the plot, this is the history of Roland, why he is like he is.
King excells himself this book is amazing, beautifull and tear jerking. Go out and buy it its a fabulous book.
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Best in the series so far
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I read at the end of the third book that this one would be all about Roland's past, and I thought to myself, that doesn't sound very interesting! but it turns out I was wrong, Hearing about Roland's past is fantastic, this is the best book in the series so far!
Gripping to the end
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