***100 Days of Summer 2023***
Reading prompt: Book between 250 and 500 pages in length
Virtual 12 sided dice roll: 2
Salvatore is maturing as a writer. This book still has an overabundance of fight scenes, described in more detail than I personally needed. At least the morality has become much more nuanced, with many shades of grey instead of strict black and white. The commitment to more realistic characters began in The Spine of the World, when the author admitted that even good guys could have libidos, make dreadful choices, and wander from the path of nobility. Despite a bit of backsliding in previous books, the author seems to have realized that adult readers need more than just sword fights to keep them entertained.
We get a schooling in Drizzt philosophy at the beginning of each section. If you are accustomed to thinking of your adversary as evil, can you bring yourself to forge a peace treaty with them? Are you letting down the unavenged dead? Is the preservation of many lives going to outweigh the past? If it might save people shouldn't peace at least be attempted? King Bruenor struggles with all these questions. Can an extremely conservative Dwarf change his beliefs about his world?
We get an up-close view of orc society in this installment. It’s maybe more like the other races than we are comfortable with in an enemy. We've been dragged through several volumes of the war with the orcs at this point and I must say that I hope we get a new kind of adventure in the next book of the series. As I have said before, I grow tired of the preponderance of warfare in fantasy literature and I would love to see Drizzt and Cattie-Brie do something different.
Book number 489 of my Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Project
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