Cowbell of Shannara

Eryn and I finished The Sword of Shannara and moved on to The Elfstones of Shannara.  It's a little better than the last book, but not by much.  While he did ratchet down the number of uses of "awesome" from 59 to about 4 (that's not a joke - use the word search in Kindle if you don't believe me), a lot of the weird overdescriptive, overinvolved sentences, and strange changes in pace and topic remain.  I don't think we've spent more than a few sentences on our main characters in quite a few chapters.

We did find some enjoyment in Brooks' villain, the Reaper.  The words fear and reaper appear in close proximity more than once, so I kept humming Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear the Reaper.  Because we were reading on the iPad, when Eryn asked me what I was humming, I could boot up a video.  Now when the Reaper makes an appearance, we both scream "More Cowbell!" and start chanting "don't fear the reaper!" Then last night, Brooks launched into a chapter explaining why the Free Corps commander (like the French Foreign Legion) Stee Jans was called The Ironman.  Eryn is very familiar with that song, having watched the Ironman movies.  I don't think I'll ever look at a Terry Brooks novel again without a 70's soundtrack playing in my head.