“It’s not often that we see an author take us far afield from the usual Realms fare, and now we’re getting a whole trilogy that has an opportunity to break the mold.”
Bad news! Life is remarkably hectic for me right now, so the next review is probably not going to be out for another few weeks. But I love my regular readers, so I figure you deserve an update of sorts to tide you over…
“Buckle up; we can’t talk about this one without first dredging up some ugly TSR history.”
“I wish more of these novels would bother depicting relationships where love is something you have to work at and build, not something that just magically happens when two people are near each other for long enough.”
“It’s been a long time since I read a Realms novel that I found myself looking forward to picking up again each time I put it down.”
“If stripped of all the padding and reduced to only scenes which further the bare “escape from Undermountain, remove curse, get revenge on our betrayer” plot, Escape from Undermountain would be a rather short novella.”
“Another year, another anthology! This year’s theme is ‘wizards and magic,’ and it must be quite the well of inspiration indeed, because there are no fewer than seventeen stories this time around plus a prologue and epilogue.”
“Mark Anthony seems like the kind of over-ambitious author for whom Jeff Grubb had to invent his notorious ‘Don’t blow up the moon’ rule.”
“War in Tethyr starts off as a potentially interesting story, but devolves into a polemic where the author uses this mass-market paperback fantasy novel as a soapbox for espousing his political convictions.”
“It’s basically Malaugrym spring break — unwise youngsters on their own without supervision for the first time, making bad decisions and getting into trouble — which is the worst way to sell them as impressive villains.”
