This is the first book in the Chronicles series in the Dragonlance universe by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It was first published in 1984, and the audiobook I listened was so old that it asked me, god how many times, to change the cassette. Yes, Cassette, children. Look it up.
I have no idea who narrated the audiobook, but I think it was the version from 1990 from Random House Audio Books, but I leave that one alone. This is a really old fantasy book based on the Dungeons & Dragons games and you can see that from the characters and their “classes” such as knight, healer, rogue and wizard. In one point they even tell us that fighters go first. The audiobook I listened to was long, like really long, around 15 to 20 hours. I have been told that there is an audio drama who had shorten the book to 3-4 hours which I probably would have preferred. You felt every hour in this book.
Well, we are going ahead of ourselves. The story starts with an old gang of veteran adventurers meet up after years apart, they encounter a barbarian princess with a staff. A staff with healing powers that could only belong to the lost gods. They decide to help the princess when she gets hunted by Dragonlings who had been send out by an unknown enemy to take the staff. The story follows the team as they encounter undead, dragons, traps in their search for the True Gods.
The characters are the leader Tanis Half-Elven, a knight named Sturm, the two brothers Caramon, the warrior, and the dark wizard Raistlin. We also have a dwarf, Flint, the thieving kender Tasslehoff, and the two barbarians Riverwind and the princess Goldmoon.
Those are just the main cast though, we also have some characters that show up later in the book to join the team such as the elven princess Laurana who is in love with Tanis, her brother Gilthanas who hates Tanis, the old wizard Fizban who isn’t what he seem to be, the barmaid Tika who wants to become a warrior to impress Caramon who she is in love with, and the evil Dragon Highlord Verminaard who is barely seen but often spoken of in the book.
I probably missed someone, such as Tanis human love interest who is spoken of in the book but hardly matters. And yes, there are four females in the book, all are hinted to be virgins (Some are said straight out to be so), two are princesses, and all of them are love interests to one of the main casts. The three women who are in the main cast are passive, even the ones who are suppose to be fighters are just lousy ones so… A very old book then.
I cannot speak of the entire cast, it’s too many to mention but there are two who sticks out. Tanis, the leader who is, if you haven’t figured it out when you read the surname, half-elven. His father raped his elven mother and he has always been torn between the two world, along with his two loves, one human and the other elven.
The other is, from what I can tell, the fan favorite Raistlin. A secretive wizard with a sick body and a mysterious past. He cares for the weak, mostly because he is constantly taken care of by his brother who see him as such, and never speaks outright about his thoughts. There are others with larger roles such as Goldmoon who carries the staff of a True God but she isn’t that interesting. Mostly it is about her being a princess in love with Riverwind who is a commoner.
Most of the characters are stereotypes that you will know well if you have read any of the old fantasy or most of all, played any of the Dungeons & Dragons games. The grumpy, bearded dwalf, the human hating elves, the old wizard and the dark wizard, the honorable knight and the reckless warrior. We know them well, and depending on the person we either love them or hate them. I found them boring with the exception if Raistlin, who I really wanted to know more about. Not that we got to know much about him, or any of the characters, at least not in this book. There is some background story to flesh out the characters, but most of it is just lore. Nothing really seem to make me understand them as people, it was just their past.
Which is a rather big problem with this book, all these fantastic races and lore but the book neglect the characters themselves. For example, Sturm is from an order of knights who is pretty much gone but he continues to act like a knight. Wonderful, why? How does he feel? Is he disappointed, does he want to reclaim his honor and if yes, why? How did he lose it? Why does he put so much effort in being a knight? Anything to make us understand how he is as a person and why. Now he is just pretty much a knight and noble. That’s it. Which is pretty much how most of the cast in this book can be summed up.
The plot is… linear. We barely get any opinion of all the characters when they receive the quest and they just go on it because that is what they do. Tanis and Raistlin is the only ones that seem to have legit reason, Tanis wants to find the True Gods and Raistlin sacrificed much in the past to gain power, which he still seeks among the dragons. It is hinted that Raistlin know what is to come and that is why he sacrificed his health for magical power.
Mostly the characters just run around, stumbles over things that will point them to their next destination without really giving us any development. They just run around, fighting and go to the next place. I cannot even describe it properly because it is just a mess of fighting and running around. They fight undead, encounter a unicorn who tells them to go where the staff was found, they find some disks who needs to be protected and then they go back to where they begun and finds out that the humans have been taken slaves and run to save them and so on and on.
I just found the book boring and think that many would think so today. This book has not aged well and lean too much into lore and too little into the characters for young people to like it. It is slow paced, maybe around 200 of the first pages goes on just to introduced the characters before they actually get the quest which is just too long. The characters are to flat and too stereotypical. This is a story that a parent loves because they read it when they were children and live on nostalgia, forcing their children to read it not getting that they won’t like the same thing that their parents liked. Now, if you are a young child and love this book today, I bow to you. It is all depends on taste but I highly doubt that many people younger than 40-50 years old would adore this book.
I will rate it a 3 out of 10, I just couldn’t enjoy it. It feels long, old and flat. Nothing, other than the hope of Raistlin getting a larger role, could entice me to continue reading this and that is never a good sign. If you would like an old classic, then this one has all the signs of one, but I just cannot see why people would like this one, so maybe another reviewer could give you a better perspective on its strengths.
With Kind Regards
Senefer.
Read with Senefer 