Book One of the Genesis of Shannara - Armageddon's Children

To be absolutely honest about this book, I have not read it as of this date. Terry Brooks has been and remains one of my favorite authors ever since I read his Sword of Shannara and Elfstones of Shannara books. I am anticipating feeling the same about Armageddon's Children as I feel about the two books I mentioned. From my particular standpoint, I will read just about anything that Terry Brooks writes.

Fascinating characters, fast paced, great concept, and very hard to predict where it's going. Terry Brooks is a great at describing the settings, moods, and interior landscapes of the characters dealing with the unbelievable. Loved it.

I have enjoyed these works for several years and have read just about everything in the Shannara and Knight series. Maybe I am expecting a lot of this book, but it did keep me interested and wanting the next book right away. It is interesting to see the two worlds merging and I can't imagine how this will end.

IMHO, very entertaining if you're into this kind of thing.

Another great novel from Terry Brooks.I wait in anticipation for every book from this author.sometime even go back and read the book from before and never get bored.if you like the likes of terry Pratchett you will love this writer AAA+++

Terry Brookes paints a very detailed (and frighteningly possible) picture of a post apocalyptic world. The characterisations are equally detailed and the book builds to a suspenseful ending that left me wanting more.

I abslolutely loved, Running with the Demon and the other 2. This book brings me back ina good way. I always wanted to know what happened with the gypsy morph,Nest Freemark, and although there is lots missing,i throughly enjoyed it. I'm just now ordering the Elves of Cintra and have fingers and toes crossed :},that the next one is not far off!

Mr. Brooks really knows how to flesh out his characters and bring them to life. Now we get to know and live in the time just before the Druids came along. This was a wonderful beginning to the telling of that time.

An entertaining but implausable story with multiple plot lines. The "over the cliff " ending reminds one of the days when picture theatres had serials that had ludicrous "hanging " endings designed to bring you back next week. This technique , perfected by Spielberg, is now just annoying .

I have really enjoyed finding out were the Shannara characters came from - but it is hard to tell what order to read the books. In order to get the most out of the books - you need to start with the Word and the Void books, and then continue on the the Genesis of Shannara. They really capture you !!!

I see the mastery of Terry Brooks' skills coming out in this book. He is finally taking all of the hidden nuggets he installed in the Shannara series and brought the story to its beginnings. Finding out that it all ties together so nicely is as much fun as reading the story itself. If you read the first series of Word and Void, then this will mature the entire story. You'll love it.

An interesting twist on the Shanarra story...another author's look at what happens in the aftermath of destruction...the "destructuring" and restructuring of society as well as the development of forces related to good and evil...a good read!

Did Terry Brooks die before finishing the book and they went on and published it anyway ? There are four distinct stories going on, all interesting, but mostly unrelated. As the book goes on the relationships between them begin to become apparent. Then all four are just left hanging and you hear "Thank you for listening ... " and it's over. Did they make a mistake and leave out half of the book or what ? Infuriating !

Did Terry Brooks die before finishing the book and they went on and published it anyway ? There are four distinct stories going on, all interesting, but mostly unrelated. As the book goes on the relationships between them begin to become apparent. Then all four are just left hanging and you hear "Thank you for listening ... " and it's over. Did they make a mistake and leave out half of the book or what ? Infuriating !

The Trilogy is pretty good, first book was kinda slow starting but was a good read, I was disappointed with the reseller that I bought the book from because there was NOT a dust cover for the hardback book.....

Apparently, for Terry Brooks, every path leads back to Shannara, for in Armageddon's Children, he bridges the gap between the fantasy series he began approximately 35 years ago, and his more recent Word and the Void trilogy, set in a contemporary United States. 100 years after the closing of the Angel Fire East, the Void has managed to gain the upper hand. The entire infrastructure of the world's governments has collapsed, much of the land is unpopulated, those humans left gathered in compounds or even more rarely trying to survive in the poisoned world outside these compounds. Once men and mutants are an ever present danger, along with the Demons. Few are left to protect the humans, with possibly only two Knights of the Word left. The Lady has sent each of them on two separate but vital missions. Logan Tom is charged with finding and protecting the Gypsy Morph, while Angel Perez must help the Elves, who have been hiding in their forests for centuries, find the Elfstones and save the Ellcrys.

There is a lot going on in this book. We're introduced not only to Logan and Angel, but also Hawk and his tribe of children, and the Elves. While I enjoyed the story, I found it be a very frustrating read. It is clearly nothing more than a set-up novel. When the book ends, three of the four storylines are left as major cliffhangers, while the fourth is still clearly not resolved, though less dramatic. Further, I really feel that our introduction to the Elves, which comprised only a small part of the storyline, could have waited until the next book. In addition, there were a lot of typos throughout my copy, which was really annoying. Despite these issues, I'll keep reading, just because I'm curious to see where it goes. Hopefully the other books are less aggravating or I might just quit. That would be a shame, because Terry Brooks and Shannara was my initial gateway into fantasy, and I'll always have a soft spot for his books.

My introduction to Terry Brooks was in the "Magic Kingdom" series. They were entertaining enough, so I picked up the first Shannara novel (in terms of publication order) to see if his master series was any good. And it wasn't for me. No harm, no foul.

When I found "Armageddon's Children" in the bargain section, I decided to give it a chance specifically because (a) it bore no mention of Shannara, and (b) was mentioned in the text as a good introduction to Terry Brooks for someone who hasn't read Shannara.

Only when I finished the book (with an ending that felt more like a stopping place than a conclusion) did I realize that (a) it was part of a series, and (b) that the series was entitled "Genesis of Shannara." In other words, a story that had originally appeared to be a standalone, post apocalyptic novel without any relationship to Shannara turned out to be a mere prequel.

And let me say, it is no place for the uninitiated. Too many characters and concepts are introduced without making the reader care about them. Perhaps in other novels that came before, we are told what is at stake and why we should care, but it is conspicuously absent from this volume.

I gave the book two stars instead of one because I can't blame Brooks for the way the book was marketed. I gave it two stars instead of five because the book was poorly written.

I'm sure there are those for whom Brooks' style is intended, but it is not for those with any attention to detail. Foreshadowing is layered in heavily, and when it pays off, it is done so with a giant finger pointing backward to the setup. It is as if the author has no faith in the ability of the reader to remember something that happened even a few pages back.

The plot was trite, the characters one-dimensional archetypes with no personality of their own, and the introduction of elves halfway through led me to abandon the book for months, before forcing my way to the end.

If you're a Terry Brooks fan, then this review only made you mad. If you're not, let it stand as a warning--if you want to be a Terry Brooks fan, this is simply not a good place to start.

Terry Brooks revisits the world of his greatest work: The Word and the Void. That original trilogy was set in a modern day United States where there are demons working for the Void trying to turn humans to acts of evil to twist the world to be a more violent, dangerous, and lost place. John Ross, a Knight of the Word, fought daily against visions of the future that he had to try to prevent. Ross's visions were of events that could happen in his own lifetime and for all of Ross's success, all he did was delay the inevitable. Armageddon's Children is set some eighty years after Angel Fire East and the world is a ruined place and things are only fixing to get worse. Pollution is out of control, a nuclear war occurred, the humans which are "safe" live in compounds (like Seattle's Safeco Field) warded off against the outside world. Those compounds are all under siege and they are falling day by day until there will be nowhere left to run or hide. In Seattle there are gangs of children calling themselves Tribes. Adults have failed them and street children are not allowed in Compounds so they must survive by becoming their own families and looking out for each other. Humans who had been caught outside for too long and who somehow survived drinking radioactive water and eating off of the poisoned land have mutated. This is our world, only broken. This could be our future.

Terry Brooks works on four storylines in Armageddon's Children. One storyline is of a Tribe of children in Seattle called the Ghosts. The Ghosts are led by an older boy named Hawk who is just trying to keep his family alive. It is through Hawk's eyes that we see what his world and our world has become. Two storylines have to do with the two known remaining Knights of the Word: Logan Tom and Angel Perez. Logan Tom has been sent by The Lady to find the Gypsy Morph somewhere in the Northwest. The Gypsy Morph is a being of great power and magic and which we know was somehow born to Nest Freemark after Angel Fire East. Before I mention the last two storylines I need to mention what had been previously rumor and conjecture. Up until the announced publication of this novel it was suggested that the Word / Void Trilogy could be the world before The Great Wars that ruined the world and slowly evolved into the Four Lands that we know in the Shannara novels. This was always a great theory. In interviews before the publication of Armageddon's Children Terry Brooks finally admitted that this was true. That in his next trilogy he would start bridging Word / Void with Shannara. So, that brings us to storyline number three: Angel Perez. Angel Perez is another Knight of the Word who has been fighting to rescue as many children as possible before compounds are overrun by the demons and Once-Men. She is given a new mission: to find the Elves and to help them find some Elfstones. Now, elves have nothing to do with Word / Void, but have everything to do with Shannara. And that brings us to storyline number four: The Elves. We actually find out about the elves before we find out about Angel Perez and when they appear and they mention the Ellcrys, longtime readers of Terry Brooks knows without question that the two series have now been linked. The Ellcrys has given one of the Chosen a mission: to find the seeking elfstones to located the Loden Elfstone to carry the Ellcrys out of the Oregon woods whole. This may not make sense to readers who have not read Elfstones of Shannara or The Elf Queen of Shannara, but Brooks makes these concepts fairly clear even to newer readers of the series.

So, that's what Armageddon's Children is about. Is it any good? Yes. The more Brooks stays to the feeling of Word / Void the better the book is. I know that we're bridging to a more traditional fantasy series, but he gives better description and characterization and storytelling when he is working in the more natural setting of Word / Void. There are references a plenty to the previous trilogy and several references to things we know from Shannara and even an explanation of why there are demons walking the land considering the nature of what we know of the Ellcrys. The primary complaint is that this is the first book of a trilogy so Brooks spends 350 pages setting stuff up and giving us some action and storytelling, but nothing is resolved. He ends with a cliffhanger (almost literally) and rolls right into Volume Two of this trilogy. Brooks does not tell a complete story. Let me contrast this with his four book Heritage of Shannara series. Each book told a complete story while still building to the larger story of the series. That is what is missing here. It is not a book that can stand alone, but because of the ties to the excellent Word / Void series it is a harkening back to when Terry Brooks was writing strong fantasy with solid description. Brooks intentionally stepped away from that, publishing a book a year and desiring to write faster, more action packed novels rather than longer works of greater quality. He sacrificed quality for quantity even though his sales did not decrease. This is a step back towards some of that quality, though I know that is because he is forced to be more descriptive about the world as it has changed from Angel Fire East and is nothing like The Four Lands. This book is designed as a book where new readers can step in and not feel lost because they haven't read 20 books on both sides of the timeline but will also reward longtime readers. Armageddon's Children is a success in for both groups of readers and while not perfect it is a strong work in the catalog of Terry Brooks.

-Joe Sherry