Although Donaldson appears to take up where he left off with the start of the second Thomas Covenant trilogy— The Wounded Land, The One Tree, and White Gold Wielder — he does so with the addition of another spiritually wounded hero: the physician Linden Avery, who takes the place of Covenant as the person who must come to accept the reality of the Land as well as to believe in her own powers to overcome despair. Even more dramatically than Covenant's affliction in the first series of novels, Avery's "leprosy" is a disease of the soul rather than of the body: she must overcome the misplaced guilt she feels for her father's suicide as well as for having helped her terminally ill mother obtain a welcomed release from her pain. Unlike Avery, Covenant now believes in the reality of the Land and has come to...