“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.”
“‘The gods give you a quest’ ranks right up there with ‘You all meet in a tavern’ and ‘You’re the chosen one’ amongst the pantheon of bad role-playing game clichés.”
“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.)”
“I’ve thrown a fair amount of shade at Salvatore in my previous reviews — the Mary Sue characters, the stilted dialogue, the incredibly florid, dramatic prose style — and all of those flaws are still present here. But despite all that, I have to admit that this is a surprisingly good book.”
“So let me get this straight, old man — you did a Ph.D in Astrology just so you could tell us “the moon’s going to keep shining, and things will be different”? Jesus, I could have told you that!”
“After all, the one thing D&D was really lacking was yet another goddamned word for polearms…”
“I appreciate Cook’s nuanced portrayal of the Tuigan: they’re dirty, brutal, and barbaric, but also clever, well-organized, and surprisingly sophisticated in some respects. It’s a much more realistic and complex depiction of a culture than the Mazticans, who seemed to be strictly divided into cartoonishly evil nobles and virtuous noble savages.”
“You know the plot already; you learned it in high school. They’re even wearing full conquistador outfits in the cover art, just to ensure you don’t miss the historical parallels and confuse this for a fantasy story.”
