The First Confessor

Terry Goodkind

2012 • 605 pages

Ratings24

Average rating4

In a time before legends had yet been born...

Married to the powerful leader of her people, safe among those gifted with great ability, Magda Searus is protected from a distant world descending into war. But when her husband, a man who loved life and loved her, unexpectedly commits suicide, she suddenly finds herself alone. Because she is ungifted herself, without her husband she no longer has standing among her people, and she finds herself isolated in a society that seems to be crumbling around her.

Despite her grief, she is driven to find the reasons behind why her husband would do such a thing--why he would abandon her and her people at such a profoundly dangerous time. Though she is not gifted, she begins to discover that there may be more to her husband's suicide than anyone knew. What she finds next, no one is willing to believe.

Without anyone to help her, she knows that she must embark on a mission to find a mysterious spiritist, if she even exists, so that she may speak with the dead. This quest may also be her last chance to unravel what is really behind the mysterious events befalling her people. What she discovers along the way is that the war is going far worse than she had known, and that the consequences of defeat will be more terrifying for her and her people than she could have imagined.

As mortal peril begin to close in around her, Magda learns that she is somehow the key to her people's salvation.

Journey with Magda Searus into her dark world, and learn how true legends are born.

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Series

Featured Series

14 primary books16 released books

#0 in Sword of Truth

Sword of Truth is a 16-book series with 14 released primary works first released in 18 with contributions by Terry Goodkind.

#0.5

#10

#11

#12

Series

1 primary book

#1 in The Legend of Magda Searus

The Legend of Magda Searus is a 1-book series first released in 29 with contributions by Terry Goodkind.

Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Jessica

You can really tell Goodkind put his heart into this! This had me from start to finish!!!! However, the audio production wasn't that great. I liked the narrator just fine, but the editing was horrible. Sometimes sentences were repeated. Other times just the last word of sentence was repeated. If this is the quality FINE Group produces I don't want it. But I've read all of the entire Sword of Truth books via audiobook so if the next Magda book is done by FINE I'll suffer through it too.

August 22, 2013

jess

After reading other books in the same world (Wizard's First Rule, Stone of Tears, etc.), I was happy to see this one on the shelf and have an opportunity to dive back in. The book promised a legend for the beginning. Goodkind again created characters to love and hate, but they felt more transparent and less real to me than characters in other stories. Even the talk of magic gets dull at times with references to star points and networks and connections. Something was missing from this story, and I'm not sure what it was.

I'd recommend this book to folks who already like the world of confessors and the sword of truth. It is interesting to have an origin story. Otherwise, skip it. There are plenty of great books out there.

November 15, 2016

Later

Overall I really liked this book even though it has a lot of the same weaknesses as any of Terry's other books. He's got a point of view and there's no subtlety about the way he hammers it in. If someone were to do a word cloud on everything in this book “live”, “life”, “living”, and other similar words would be giant and everything else would be tiny. Not a bad philosophy, but I did get tired of having that point beaten in over and over.

One other very weird complaint... The chaptering in this book is kind of ridiculous. There's one sequence where Magda goes to visit a spiritist that takes at least 5 chapters when it would be more logically slotted into one. It's all one sequence of events and the way the chapters are broken up serve to falsely create cliffhanger moments that don't really work as such.

In any case, despite the heavy-handedness and the weird chaptering the story is really very good. It's much, much better than The Omen Machine and several books in the Sword of Truth series (I'm looking at you, Pillars of Creation).

December 20, 2012