
The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore
The Crystal Shard, although technically preceded by THE DARK ELF TRILOGY according to the new reading order, was actually Salvatore’s first Drizzt novel and in fact his first novel, period. The Crystal Shard does have a lot of the usual first-novel bugs (mechanics sometimes don’t work out the way they should, dialogue is frequently hamfisted), but it also has something that I feel began to fade out of THE LEGEND OF DRIZZT after a while: ambition. Ambition doesn’t usually go hand-in-hand with shared-world novels for obvious reasons, but there it is. The Crystal Shard feels raw, in content but also in tone. There’s a sense, by DARK ELF at least, that Salvatore is beginning to be comfortable with his success and thus more prone to taking it easy. The Crystal Shard has more of an edge, reaches a little further, tries a bit harder. Occa... Read More