“Now, I’m not the sort of reader who believes that it’s necessary to torture your characters to make compelling drama. But characters who have only one problem are only as interesting as that problem, and ‘monsters attack’ is not interesting.”
“But even I know enough about wilderness survival to be sure that you shouldn’t treat a freely bleeding stab wound by rubbing a bunch of ferns into it, and you shouldn’t try sliding around the forest on gobbets of raw antelope.”
“With five books all focusing on one overarching story, the temptation to indulge in sloppy characterization and meandering plots requires immense discipline to avoid. “Disciplined” isn’t really an adjective that springs to mind when I think about Salvatore’s writings thus far.”
“It’s nice to see elven society finally getting some attention. Despite thousands of years of culture and history, most authors don’t go any further into characterizing elves than the usual ‘nature-loving hippies’ stereotype.”
“So what are we to make of this Lawrence of Anauroch? It may be derivative, but it’s certainly not boring.”
“Montolio feels like a much more sinister character to me now as an adult than he did when I was a teenager — the personification of the ugly questions about racism that the Drizzt books keep raising but then never addressing.”
“Just once I’d like to see Niles write a book with no divine intervention or mystical prophecies in it, where someone in the plot has some real agency… but I’m not getting my hopes up.”
“If anything, it feels like more of a slog when grimness isn’t relieved by the occasional dose of humour or sentiment — without the light to contrast against it, darkness gets boring pretty quickly.”
“1991 brought us many momentous events: the first Gulf War, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid, and the release of the final book in the Empires trilogy. (Curiously, that last one takes up much less space in the history books than the others.)”
“There’s still some dialogue that feels stilted, some descriptions which seem affected, but the writing here isn’t nearly as painful as his previous work. (Either that or I’m just developing scar tissue from all the terrible books I’ve read, which is a very real possibility.)”
