As I’d just bought the 11th (!) and final book in the series for my dad (I know – guilt. He’s going to hand it over as soon as he finishes!), it was time to go back and start at the beginning. With some trepidation: I’d repeated that pattern (starting at the beginning with each newly published volume) so many times in the past that I’d made myself quite sick of book 1!

But turns out a good few years (urm… since 1990-something!?) was a long enough break, and I completely lapped this up (again)! It’s just spot-on fantasy fiction, with the beautiful girl with dark secrets, the baddie with absolutely no morals, dangers by the bucketload in a cross-countries quest, and of course our brave, smart, handsome, kind, quite frankly sickenly wonderful hero. Only he’s not – sickening. He’s Richard Cypher and he rocks. Huh.

Several years after discovering The Sword of Truth (of which this is part 1), I started reading Robert Jordon’s Wheel of Time and found more than a few similarities. Gutted! WoT came first, you see… However, while I soon got lost with (and a bit bored of) Jordon’s sprawling epic, SoT is much warmer and friendlier, somehow – even in the bits where people are being tortured horribly, at least you really care about the people!

My duff memory helps a lot when I reread books, and I was surprised at how many twists and turns, how many different scenes, are crammed into this 700-odd page book. Unlike WoT, a lot of ground is covered, albeit in a fair few pages, but you do have a sense of closure at the end. Also a good sense that there is a continuing story, of course!

Wizard’s First Rule was lovely, comfort reading. All the more so knowing I can follow all the rest of the journey now!

Its one of the best books ever writen. The copy I own is falling apart, I’ve read it hundreds of times.