[Kalimac]

Sword of Shannara is a definite ripoff, WoT is problematic - I'm somewhat biased against it because I found it impossible to wade through the prose style, but there were a lot of ideas about different types of magic that didn't seem particularly rooted in Tolkien, and a few of them were quite good - just badly developed. The female characters are handled differently, they're much more prominent, though unfortunately most of them are unintentionally obnoxious. The central theme is of a group of green kids going on a quest, one of them has a special destiny, eventually they get separated and go off to meet various heroic fates. That's rather familiar, but it's also a fairly universal theme. The brooding hero, unfortunately, isn't Frodo-quality; he goes from tormented and questioning in the beginning of Book 1 to tormented and questioning somewhere in the middle of book 5, which is where I gave up. Two of his more humourous male companions are best friends named Mat and Perrin, which sounds...familiar. What can I say? It beats a waiting-room magazine, but I wouldn't pay real money for it.