Essentially the storyline of this trilogy is the same as Tolkien, and a thousand fantasy writers following The Formula: Heroes travel across land to defeat Big Bad Evil Villain. Lots of weird stuff happens. Emotional trauma. Battles. Magic. You get the picture; it's all laid out in Diana Wynne-Jones's "Tough Guide to Fantasyland." Comparisons to Tolkien are, let's face it, inevitable... Even if you see this as a tribute, it's not even a GOOD tribute!

Unfortunately this book lacks the texture of Tolkien's writing. By interspersing the long stretches of, say, running after the orcs, Tolkien gave us insights into Elves and orcs alike. McKiernan does not accomplish this--heck, he barely describes any action so mundane and gives it a feeling of magic. Reading it gave me a headache. Additionally, he does not seem to understand that saying a character is a hero and telling us why is not enough to make us BELIEVE it. Let the person's actions throughout the book tell us why.

His writing style is underdone and lacks the majesty of Tolkien, the sparkle of McKinley or the poetry of McKillip's... Places and people are the same as in Tolkien's world, except the names are changed; for example, the Rohirhim are the Vanadurin; the orcs are rukhs; hloks and ogres; heck, we even get McKiernan's own version of the Balrog, Shire, and Aragorn! And the similarities are unending. We get an elf-lord (sort of a melding of Legolas and Glorfindel) named Gildor, the name of an elf early in LOTR. We also have an obvious ripoff of Galadriel at the end of Book 1.

Unlike Middle-Earth, Mithgar is given little backstory or mythos to captive us and give a sufficient feeling of reality. The Warrows are obviously a pale imitation of hobbits, which is the first thing that annoyed me. After that the Dwarves, the stereotypical damsel in distress (for all the complaints about lack of women in Middle-Earth, they were NEVER DiDs) with the spine of an eclair. The hero, Tuck, drove me crazy with his constant tears and snivelling--tell me, did Frodo shed a single tear in Moria, let alone cry every page or so? Enough, already! Galen is a pale shadow of Aragorn. Continuity concerning weapons and personalities is freely discarded when the author feels like it... And for those who say that all fantasy copies Tolkien, I beg to differ. Queen of fantasy Patricia McKillip was inspired to write by Tolkien, yet she is one of the most original, unTolkienish fantasy authors of all time, focusing more on majesty, mystery and magic rather than bad imitations of Minas Tirith. Ditto with Terry Pratchett, who uses fantasy and magic to spoof... everything.

McKiernan's trilogy is an unsatisfying clone of Tolkien's classic epic. Though he is reportedly more original later on, I won't be reading his other books...