“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.”
Author: Candlekeep Janitor
These shelves won't dust themselves, you know.
“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.”
“If I were to rank every baby in fiction by how sympathetically they’re portrayed, Kaedlaw would rank just ever so slightly above the keening fetus-beast from Eraserhead.”
“There are a million problems with drow society, but Liriel’s only problem with it is that it so often bores her.”
I just did an interview with D&D YouTube personality No Fun Allowed where we chat about literary criticism, D&D novels, and the process of reviewing them. See if you can pinpoint the exact moment in the video where I spill a small amount of tea on myself, then try to look cool and pretend it never happened! So smooth.
“It’s such a relief to spend time with a female character who feels like a real person after slogging through so many women used as sex objects in the recent Ed Greenwood novels.”