I'm now deep inside The Sword of Truth saga, it was highly recommend by a friend of mine, and I must say it's one of the more involved and complex books I've read. The cast of characters is small (which is a relief when compared to the Wheel of Time, which has hundreds of characters), likable and real.

I don't know if I can easily explain it, but all the books contain very tightly woven plots, and capture the reader. Beware, I read the first seven books in the last week, and they are ~3,500 pages. The action is fast paced, thrilling, and highly enjoying.

I've heard it say that the novels are very violent, but I found it to be a reasonable level. It's not a children story, and it's not supposed to be one. It's very good to read fantasy that is meant for adult, with adults as heroes, unlike most of the fantasy meant for teenagers, where the heroes are both young an immature. The books are far more complex than the normal fantasy books, and I liked that a lot.

Here are the current books, and their respective reviews. I'll try to write my impression of the book, and not their plot, but there might be some spoilers.

This is the first book, and it start out as many fantasy novels. A young man find a damsel in distress, with dark secrets burdening her, and discover that he is destined for a magic sword and to save the world from the dominion of a ruthless, evil tyrant, or risk the destruction of all.
That is how the book starts, like many other fantasy novels, but it quickly turns much more serious. Our hero is captured, tortured and broken. By this time, you're already bonded with the hero, and Goodkind makes sure that you suffer as well as the hero. The inevitable escape turns out to be unlikely as well, since the evil overlord hands over the keys and ask the hero if he would like a horse for the escape.

This book is far more real than many others that I've read. It capture the heart and soul of the reader, and put them in place of the hero and heroine.

The second book start with drastic consequences of vanquishing the evil at the end of the first book. Our heroes are yanked from their soon-to-be-wedded bliss and are torn apart, each thinking the worst of the other. It's hard to describe much of the going-on in the book without spoiling the plot, but we learn much more about the world and the abilities of the hero and heroine. For the first time, their love is put to the test, and much more background is unfolded. The most impressive thing that I found in this book was that despite the amount of story and details the story covers, the reader is not drowning in all the details.

In the third book, invasion threaten the land, from a force of righteous evil which seeks to destroy all magic in the world and free mankind from its interference. This is the first fantasy novel which actually describe the actions of a victorious army in conquered lands (hint, it's not pretty). Some very fine scenes of battle, and even better scene of turbulent emotions and actions.  

 Plague is released into the domain of our heroes, and in order to stop it, desperate actions need to be taken. The following sentence pretty much sumerise the book. But it doesn't do it justice. The book is filled with action and emotions, with bloody battle and heroic scenes. Despicable evil and vile deeds. The end is climatic, touching, and as abrupt as anything.

Even more trouble follows, the heroes finally get to marry and lie with each other, with troubling results. The actions continue in a fast pace, and the ending is heart tearing. It's a good book, but I had many a hard moment reading it. The emphaty Goodkind manage to evoke for some of the bad characters is painful. One of the characters is falling to evil (threatening and then killing a woman, for example) and I just couldn't stand that he would do such a thing. He had such a potential for good that it hurt.

This is by far the best book, in my opinion. It talks about a country where man is thought evil by birth, and the only hope is absolution in the next life (sound familiar?). The hero is forced to take a trip to this land, and to live in despair in it. This land believe that it's the duty of all man kind to help those in needs, and they enforce this policy with iron fist. It's much live Soviet Russia would've liked to be (in ideals, if not in practice), and it suffer from much the same flaws. It's a very good protrayal of a society where basic rules of economy are ignored. Those with means are Evil because they have means, the poor are novel because of their suffering and no evil action can be blamed of the aggressor, but is rather blamed on the circumstances that caused him to do so. It's a beautiful work, and the end is very good. Hopeful, even.

At first, I thought that I picked the wrong book by mistake, as it had nothing to do with the story so far. It didn't degrade the quality of the story at all, but I sorely wanted to read about the familiar characters again. It's a good book, but I couldn't very well like it. I want my old characters back, not to read about new ones, and watch them develop all over again. Beyond that, the ending was the weakest point of the book. After spending ~650 pages about new characters, we are given a few chapters about the old characters, and then the book conclude, not in a thunder, as the other books, but in a rash, as if the author was in a hurry and couldn't be held to his usual high standards. It's a shame, because it ruins a book that could be very good otherwise.

I've not read these two yet, I'm currently started Naked Empire, so I'll post when I'm done. I'm hoping that they prove to be better than the 7th book.