No, but really...

I've read my share of dork books, and the covers ALWAYS make them look a lot dorkier than they are.

But this one, jesus. There is not one iota of character or description or anything interesting at all. The only thing that's remotely of note, even if it is fucking tasteless, is that the book makes heavy allusions to September 11th. At the "climax" of the book (even though nothing is at stake) two volcanoes (unimaginatively called "twin fire mountains" by the low-tech peoples in the book) erupt and wreak havoc upon the enemies, who happen to be mindless insects, get this, hiding in caves.

After this blatant crap, the woman protagonist leaves the war, because she's seen too much. I will add the quote when I get home (I neglected to bring that reeking pile of fecundity to work today) but it's something like, "Something got messed up. We did things we weren't supposed to do." Kind of like the Iraq war, bitch?

Eddings wrote some decent shit in his day. The Belgariad wasn't bad and it's sequels had some merit. I always thought he was one of those guys who made changes to previous details in his books when he needed a plot point in the later ones. He was never consistent, except in his bad jokes and eye-rolling mention of body odor. But now, I'm convinced he is just senile (he is 74) and it was a bad idea to put his wife on the cover. Apparently, they've always kind of worked together on ideas and writing, but now she's on every book, and they've pretty much sucked since he started diluting his talent.