Against All Things Ending

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.

September 1, 2010

Daggers and wizards, time travel, leprosy—for fans of fantasy, there's much to like in Donaldson's latest installment in the multivolume Thomas Covenant epic series of yore.

When last we saw Thomas, way back in 1983, he was, to put it gently, dead—and not, in the words of the necromancer of The Princess Bride, merely "mostly dead." The intervening three decades have served him well, for the saintly Thomas—who "had turned his back on scorn and punishment long before Lord Foul had slain him"—is back courtesy of some kindly magic on the part of lissome Linden Avery, in tandem with the white gold ring (in fantasy, it seems, it's always the ring) he bears and a few other soupçons of sorcery. He has a quest before him, natch, for the bad guys are plotting, yet again, to subjugate the otherwise idyllic realms of humankind and replace them with some grim Ragnarok. Having already toured hither and yon, "toward the Sunbirth Sea" and into the land of the Elohim, "cryptic beings of pure Earthpower who appear to understand and perhaps control the destiny of the Earth," Thomas is understandably tired, but he knows the call of duty when he sees it. As befits the genre—and this is respectable genre fiction, if likely to appeal largely to those who have already followed the series or embraced fantasy lock, stock and pestle—Donaldson trades capably in ersatz Icelandic saga, with shades of Tolkien throughout. Alas, this is much talkier than Tolkien, though, who favored explication in the doing, not in the describing. No harm there, save that a few hundred pages in, the reader may wish a salutary sip of the waters of Middle Earth as a palate cleanser.

If the likes of Cirrus Kindwind, the Lost Deep and She Who Must Not Be Named, and lines such as "Through the bane's ferocity, she smelled the acrid pulse of unnatural blood," are your bag (or Baggins), well, then this is just your book.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2010

Thomas Covenant has returned from the dead, raised to his own body by the love of Dr. Linden Avery through the use of the Staff of Law, the white gold ring, and an ancient dagger known as High Lord Loric's krill. But in the Land where he was once healthy and whole, Covenant suffers a reoccurrence of his earthly disease, leprosy. In addition, his return has freed the Worm of the World's End, threatening both the Land and the Earth with destruction. The penultimate novel in Donaldson's final series involving this character opens the Land to a new level of danger and intrigue as Avery, now the Chosen, must struggle to save her adopted son while coping with the consequences of her questionable action in bringing Covenant back to life. VERDICT Donaldson's fan base will enjoy the further adventures of these familiar characters; expect demand.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2010
The third volume of the concluding tetralogy of Thomas Covenant maintains the high standards of the first two volumes. Covenants spirit has been released from the Arch of Time, and his body is intact. But for this to happen, Linden Avery has had to assemble so much magical power that she is in danger of waking the Worm of the Worlds End. The Worm is a classic apocalyptic beast, but it is highly credible that he could destroy the Land, all in it, and perhaps parts of an earth that is closer to the Land than we may have thought. The only hope of survival is for Linden and Thomas to assemble all their possible and not-so-possible allies, including Lindens adopted son, Jeremiah, who may live up to the biblical implications of his given name and be a harbinger of disaster rather than hope. Donaldson remains a romantic who believes in lovers who will risk all for each other. He is also a writer of extraordinary power and imagination, whose Land certainly has flavors of Middle Earth but has now stood for two generations as a major fantasy creation in its own right.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)