Against All Things Ending

Fair warning, this novel begins with an introduction that summarizes the two previous books in the series, and it lasts almost an hour. Of course, that's not much considering that the entire audiobook is more than 30 hours long. Narrator Tim Reynolds admirably performs the somewhat verbose work about a dead wizard who is resurrected by his daughter, an act that releases the Worm of the World's End, which plans to devour the world. Reynolds juggles a huge cast of characters with unusual names like Esmer, Clyme, Rime Coldspray and races like the Hatichai, the Ramen, and the Elohim. Reynolds imbues each character with some uniqueness, but the sheer number combined with the complicated plot makes sticking with this lengthy book a challenge. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

August 2, 2010
The unreservedly emo penultimate installment in the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (after 2007's Fatal Revenant) follows Linden Avery as she struggles to rescue her adopted son, Jeremiah, from the Despiser and forestall the Worm at the World's End, which she awoke by yanking her love, Covenant, free of the Arch of Time. While an introductory plot summary does yeoman service bringing new readers up to speed, it may be hard for them to keep so many characters straight—or care about them—when most of their development took place in previous volumes published decades ago. The focus is on Linden rather than Covenant, whose passive and distracted presence mostly gives others something to react to, but that won't matter to Covenant's large and loyal following, for whom Donaldson delivers all the self-loathing, despair, guilt, pain, and stubborn determination they could ask for.