Book Review: Well of Darkness

I didn't mention what I had been reading after crappy football or late at night. The book was Well of Darkness by the venerable Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

A little background. There was a big book sale at Hastings here in town on all of their clearance books. Two titls (among others) caught my eye main because of the authors. Way back in time of antiquity (7th grade) I was introduced to the fantasy genre in the form of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, of the Dragonlance Chronicles, by those same two authors. So they hold a special place in my heart, even if their writing in that series wasn't necessarily the greatest. But I have also read Weis's Death Gate Cycle, which I found excellent. So combining that past knowledge with the positive reviews at Amazon.com, I had high hopes.

So I'm browsing the shelves at Hastings and there were two books by these two that caught my eye. They were the second and third books in the Sovereign Stone Trilogy. I hadn't heard of that trilogy before and there was no copies of the first book to be seen but I said what the heck and got them both, figuring I could find the first book at a later date. When I went to Minnesota for a weekend, one of the things I made sure to do was to go to Half Price Books to see if they possibly had the book I was looking for. After my first perusal through their fantasy aisle I was disappointed that I hadn't found it. Of course, looking a second time exactly where I had just investigated turned up a completely different result and there it was. So I bought it there for just about the same price I paid for the other two and my trilogy was complete.

I started reading it on the way home a little and even poked my head into it while driving to Yellowstone Park. Finally last night I finished it and I have to say...it was okay.

Even with the fairly good reviews at Amazon.com my first inkling of trepidation was that in the Foreward (or somewhere) the authors mentioned that the book was set in a table top role playing game world and if the reader liked the adventure in the book that we could "create our own in this world" by purchasing the game. Yikes, I hadn't see that before, and I didn't like it.

The overall world and story was pretty good but there were a few things that just bugged me too much to ignore. A few acutely critical events and decisions seemed to be made solely to move the plot forward, not because it made any sense for the characters to go in that direction or make that decision. For one thing they had the worst falling in love sequence since Anakin and Padme in Attack of the Clones. That's high praise right there. It just didn't make any sense for these two to be in love.

There were other instances like that equally as dissatisfying, but I can't say that the book was all bad. It was good enough for me to plow through it in fairly short time and certainly good enough for me to want to read through the next two books. Though I'm guessing that I won't find these so good as to want to add them to the collection of books that I feel like keeping.

So I'll let you know how the next two books are when I get to them, hopefully soon.

I just noticed that this "review" is mostly talking about getting the books and explaining that whole story, which has nothing to do with the book itself, and then the actually review is very terse. I guess the book just didn't inspire me to write lots about it. So-so. Okay. Fair to midlin'. Those are descriptors that fit this book and at the same time indicate that there's not much to write about.