The Iron Tower Trilogy

No saving this one from the fall. Unashamedly put in the Terribly Written Books category.A shameless rip from Tolkien. And I mean a really, really, really shameless rip. If Terry Brooks 'borrows' ideas from Tolkien, McKiernan straight out copies them word for word, changing a couple of syllables here and there. Shame on the man for lacking even the creativity to change the characters to something NOT directly copied from Tolkien. Frankly, if Tolkien was still alive, McKiernan would have been sued.For starters: Tuck = Frodo Baggins in ALL but name. Galen = Aragorn Fildor = Legolas Rael = GaladrielAnd it gets worse as you read. I almost hope a copyright theft lawsuit by the Tolkien estate stops this crime of a series from doing any more damage to tender young fantasy minds. Apparently this is how the whole sordid mess started: McKiernan suffered a terrible motorcycle crash, and upon waking, decided he wanted to write a sequel to LOTR (and I think he did so). A publisher expressed interest in this terrible idea given literary form and sent a letter to the Tolkien Estate seeking the rights to publish the sequel. The Estate was not pleased and denied to grant the rights; McKiernan was then told by the publisher to re-write LOTR with different character names as the backstory to the sequel. And the demon known as The Iron Tower was infamously birthed into this world.