Better than the first in the series, perhaps because more of it takes place in Elven settings. I'm not sure why I like those better. Maybe it's because the Shannara stories tend to be more like "good fights evil and eventually wins in the end" and these are more like "good fights evil and wins the battle, but it doesn't matter because evil will win the war." (Right now, I seem to prefer the former.)

One thing that seems to happen in this series is that in confrontations, the good characters seem to have these hidden powers that make them much more powerful than their opponents. I guess it's the same outcome as in the all-fantasy books, but it feels different in these, almost as if Brooks couldn't figure out a way to bring those powers into play during the normal course of the story. It's OK, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. (Why doesn't Character X figure out that she can do Y when Z happened?)

Spoiler

One thing that occurred to me during this book is that it isn't necessarily clear that these stories happen before the Shannara stories. The title of the trilogy seems to indicate such, but there's nothing that says that all this came first yet. Maybe this is what happened after the last Shannara series: Elves gradually gave up on their magic, and as they did, Men took over more and more of the world (think Tolkien as well). Maybe it just reminds me of [b:A Canticle for Leibowitz|164154|A Canticle for Leibowitz|Walter M. Miller Jr.|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172331601s/164154.jpg|250975].