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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7920308" data-attributes="member: 8461">It's been well over twenty years since I've read this book, so I don't have many clear memories of it, which I suppose is also my indictment of it, since the books that I do like I tend to go back and re-read my favorite sections at various points. But not this one.In truth, I don't think I've ever enjoyed an Ed Greenwood novel. The man has an incredibly fertile imagination, but his characters and his pacing always leave me cold. The characters (in my opinion) all tend towards very flat archetypes, particularly because they all seem to be completely ruled by their id. Characters who fall in love will be utterly flat-out crazy in love, unable to stop themselves from proclaiming their feelings out loud every other scene. Elminster and similar "mentor" characters will all vacillate between passive-aggressively snarking at their charges' naivete and having a plan for everything that could possibly happen when an enemy attacks. Villains will wear their foibles large, either plotting against everyone around them all of the time or dedicated beyond all reason to destroying the heroes.The pacing isn't much better. His stories tend to proceed in an extremely chaotic manner, largely because he has magic show up everywhere with very little context. His adventures will have people stumble into portals of teleportation in old caves in the middle of nowhere, utter a word and accidentally activate an old wand that they thought was just a minor magic item, or stumble into some ancient but still-active spell that suddenly changes the entire scene. And while all of that makes sense within the context of a high-fantasy world with a long history, it's the presentation that I can't stand, because none of it is contextualized within the framework of the story, or at least not very much. These things just come out of left field and boom, the characters barely have a chance to react to them before the story is rushing onward to the next scene. That might be "realistic" for how things would work in a crazy fantasy world, but a sequence of "stuff just happens (with little explanation)" doesn't make for good reading. The characters don't need to be the center of the universe, but they shouldn't seem like they're constantly being buffeted by forces that they keep blindly stumbling into either.So yeah, not a fan of this one.</blockquote>

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