The end has finally come to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Return of the King is the final installment of this legendary series and honestly I found it to be the best book out of the other Lord of the Rings books. It is full of unexpected twists on top of the impending question “how is it going to end?”
Tolkien did an excellent job with The Return of the King, but of course he did not change his writing at all. Ms. Khawaja, you are probably convinced that my mind is set primarily on criticizing his formal writing technique, but I cannot help it because his style just perturbs my brain. It is too formal and repetitive. He is very verbose in his writing style; it would take him twenty words to describe how a turtle managed to cross the street. However, his descriptiveness comes in handy when scenes of great suspense are written on the pages of the book. Tolkien will bore you to putting down the book and moving on to searching for new Apps on your iPod touch, but he will also bring you to Middle Earth. When a battle takes place or a confrontation between a small hobbit and a nasty little creature over a magical ring, J.R.R Tolkien succeeds in creating imagery within his work. He has this ability to practically put a person there alongside the characters; almost as if it was a movie playing live, right in front of you.
The ending of the book may drag on forever, but it is worth reading those extra hundred pages. Just to throw this out there, I found the ending sad but yet an excellent finish to the storyline. For once there isn’t exactly a happy ending for the heroes. They are not given the “Heroes Welcome” when they finally return home and –spoiler alert- the main character goes off to be immortal, but with the price of leaving Middle Earth forever. I was choking up at this part because it is a sad farewell to a character whom you have almost “befriended,” you –as the reader- were right there by his side throughout his entire journey yet now it’s all over. Also I was choking up because I had seen the movie before, and it is nothing but crying and sadness-stricken goodbyes.
Would I recommend this book to a friend? As I have said with the other two fantastic books, yes I would definitely recommend this book to a friend. But my warning is re-administered: those who do not wish to commit to reading this vocabulary-intense and verbose novel should not even bother reading the first page. If you cannot find the free time to read this amazing book, take out three hours of your weekend and what the movie. If you chose option B, I also recommend lots of refreshments because this movie is very long and you will not want to pause it half way through the film to get a snack.
