Well I finished Sword and after sruggling to get into it I really enjoyed it. I'm now working my way through Elfstones and loving it so far.
The beginning of Elfstone was a bit reminiscent of Tolkein only in that the same families and same magician/druid are used to carry on the tale years later as in the Hobbit/LoTR, but in fantasy I think you can see parallels in every book and there are very few unique ideas. I find Brooks a lot easier to read than Tolkein, more of a story and less of a history lesson. Done well I'm sure the movie of this could be fantastic, I just hope it is done well.
And as we are talking about stealing other peoples' ideas I'm sure some one else has borrowed the Sword of Truth concept
but of course that isn't a fantasy book