The Elf Queen of Shannara by Terry Brooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the 19th book of the Shannara series I have read, as I make my way through this series in its chronological order.
I liked this book for its main story concerns Wren Ohmsford whose charge from the shade of Allanon is to find the Elves and restore them to the Four Lands. Wren had good supporting characters such as Garth, a Splinterscat, Tiger Ty, and Aurin Striate. I made a note of Aruin Striate's speech,

“Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore.
He smiled faintly. "Then you have a choice. You can either give in to what you're feeling, just say 'okay, enough is enough' and be done with it, or you can fight it. You can accept that every day you're alive you're going to have to face it down, that you're going to have to say to yourself that you don't care what you feel, that it doesn't matter what happens to you because sooner or later it is going to happen anyway, that you're going to do what you have to because otherwise you're defeated and life doesn't have any real purpose left. When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn’t matter all that much—that those in here mattered more. You know something? It’s not so hard really. You just have to get past the fear.

I recommend this book for fans of the series. It is Book Three of "The Heritage of Shannara."

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