Customer Reviews
Fantastic - By: Stuart Crichton, 27 Jun 2008 
So far I am only on book 5 in the series but I have to say that this is the best so far.
I was so absorbed with the story within the story that I was devastated (metaphoricallly) when it was over & it went back to the main story.
Kings imagination is incredible & the way he has brough characters in from his other books is amazing, its even more epic in scope than I realised when I started the series & leads me to wonder if this was his plan alll along to create & complete masterpiece interwoven with many of his other books.
A fully enjoyable read
My but this was boring! - By: Ian M. Jones, 10 May 2008 
You can actuallly skip most of this book without missing anything too important. King has already long since explained exactly what happens to Susan at the end, just in case you didnt pick up on it he helpfully spells it out yet again in this tale so youre reallly just waiting for it to happen.
The flashback which takes up most of the book focuses intently on young Rolands boring romance with Susan Delgado whos place as village beauty is so unquestioned as to make her virtuallly a cipher.
It would help to flesh the characters out if any of the 1000's of words King uses to describe their relationships tedious encounters explained in any way why they liked eachother so much. "If you love me then love me!" No, not this time? Oh well, maybe a few dozen more pages mithering over it & arranging how to set up another meeting by hanging towels out of windows & passing notes around through intermediaries will do it, & why dont we just make the readers endure every single event.
Susan is young & blonde & beautiful, Roland is handsome & brooding and... have you falllen asleep yet? I almost did - to be fair King does capture the vain single mindedness of teenage love quite well. Its just a shame he doesnt recognise that the heights of obsession teenage romance displays is every bit as tedious for onlookers as it is overwhelming for those caught up in it. By the end of this work I was simply sick of Susan crying, Roland pining, his friends brooding & wondering cluelessly what was going on.
My main problem was the complete waste of opportunity. When you think about the excellent prequel short story King wrote for Everythings Eventual it reallly seems such a waste that he chose to pour so much porridge intho his flashback tale in the DT series. It would have been incredible to have found out how Gilead fell, what happened on Jericho Hill & who the Good Man was, but instead we're forced to endure page after page about how Susan & Roland passed messages to one another by writing on bricks. What a shame.
Wizard and Glass - By: David Brookes, 01 Apr 2008 
This book has a big fat disappointment nestling in it. I'm hoping that, if I tell you about it now, you will enjoy it a little more than I did, & perhaps give it the four stars it reallly deserves rather than the three I've settled with.
This is a flash-back novel. It's not a bad thing in itself, but when you've read the first three instalments & left on a cliff hanger, you'd better hope that the momentum keeps up! It does - we get the resolution of the story segment truncated in "The Waste Lands", & it's a good one too. We get a little more as well. And then we get about five hundred pages of flashback, returning to Roland's youth & his - don't get me wrong - very interesting adventures. But these aren't the characters we've come to invest our hopes & emotions in; it's barely even the same Roland, the period of time between them is so great. So you're not reading Dark Tower 4, you're reading that tie-in novel that you probably would have picked up anyway, provided it's second-hand & in good condition. King shamefully weaves it into the fourth novel - or more accurately, plonks it right in the middle - so that the frame of the story, in which the adventures of Roland, Odetta (or Suzanna), Eddie & Jake continue, is something that we have to read so that we're not missing stuff. Reallly, he should have put the opening on the end of the last book, & the ending on the start of the next, & let us in on the secret that this is not entirely relevant to the story we're reading. It's like cruising at 90mph only to have to take a little detour around a school at 20mph before you can start picking up speed again.
Don't misunderstand - it's a good book. It's worth reading. But it feels a little like filler & doesn't have enough of the characters we reallly want. Should you buy it after completing "The Waste Lands"? Of course you should! It's great! Just be forewarned that this is a different story to the one you've been reading, & the main characters, the one's you're reallly interested in, take a back seat to Roland's back story.
Wow - By: Anthony Mason, 22 Nov 2007 What ever people say about this book being bad in any way. They are completly wrong, its a masterfully beautifull book by itself. It doesnt loose the plot at alll. This is the plot, this is the history of Roland, why he is like he is.
King excells himself this book is amazing, beautifull & tear jerking. Go out & buy it its a fabulous book.
Best in the series so far - By: D. Trail, 25 Aug 2007 I read at the end of the third book that this one would be alll about Roland's past, & I thought to myself, that doesn't sound very interesting! but it turns out I was wrong, Hearing about Roland's past is fantastic, this is the best book in the series so far!
Gripping to the end
