The Thieves’ Guild (Dragonlance Crossroads, Vol. 2)
The Thieves’ Guild (Dragonlance Crossroads, Vol. 2)
Palanthas, Jewel of Ansalon, City of Seven Circles, heart of the old Solamnic empire. For three thousand years she has shone as a becaon to the world. Even now, ruled by the Knights of Neraka, she glitters in the night.
Yet at the core of the gleaming city lies a dark center: the Thieves’ Guild. Though the Dark Knights ruthlessly crushed the guild beneath an iron heel, a stronger, darker guild has arisen. Now it’s intent on recovering its lost treasures and power.
And nothing will stand in its way.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars An Entertaining Read
The Thieves Guild by Jeff Crook details the rise and fall of a great crime network and how the most skilled of thieves survive through the adversity. In the huge metropolis of Palanthas, Cael Ironstaff, son of the revered Tanis Half-Elven, takes up residency as a cutpurse ready to compete for the great treasures of an ancient city. Yet his overwhelming confidence, marvelous skill, and dashing charm can only take him so far…
I liked The Thieves Guild because it gave me an intricate and pleasing image of Palanthas, my favorite city in the world of Dragonlance. Crook describes the social structure and customs in a way as not to bore the reader and in fact, moves the plot very quickly filling it with exciting and meaningful action. The first and final chapters are each slightly separated from the rest of the book and provide a nice acclimation to the plot and closure.
The Thieves Guild is a solid fantasy book with all the major elements of such: fast action, involved plot, and a special characteristic uniqueness marking the work as Crook’s own. Like most books of the genre, the middle portion of the plot dips slightly into being boring but this ends quickly. I recommend The Thieves Guild to anyone interested in good, solid, fantasy, especially those keen to the Dragonlance universe.
1 Stars Boring
This book needed a lot more work before being published. Firstly, the character point of view used is so distant that it is impossible to get any emotional relationship with the characters. Even when they do something interesting, they don’t seem to be acting out of any motivation than that the plot needs it.
The writing style is full of cliche.
There are too many mysteries about the main character that are mentioned, then forgetten, the answers to which you can’t even guess at. The villians are boring, and heros just peole who are there.
When there is an attempt to create something truly fantastic, it is surrounded by boring charaters, and enshrouded in so much mystery that it just seems silly. All the powers of the staff are stupid, we’re supposed to beleive here’s this guy and he has the most powerful thing ever made, this thing can put the staff of Magius to shame, but the guy just has, given to him by his Shalafi. Throughout the book were told he’s taught how to fight by his shalafi, given the staff by his Shalafi. It’s not fantastic writing, just silly, not believable.
And the nonsense that he’s Tanin’s son. Instead of creating a charater that has an interesting points at all, the guy just claims to be Tanis’s son, as if we should belive that (By his age we know that Tanis would have had to cheat on Laurana and I don’t accept that) it’s not said he’s Tanis’s son, the character claims it, but whether or not it’s true has no impact on the story.
It’s just so boring. Sol Stein who has written some amazing books on writing fiction says the job of the writer is to evoke emotion in the reader. At no part of the book is there any attempt to evoke any emotion. Perhaps we are supposed to get wrapped up in the action seens, but that are so contrived.
I only wrote this because I read the book after reading the other reviews. There are so many good books out there, read something written by an accomplished writer. I don’t like saying bad things about writters, but Jeff Cook does not seem ready for novel writing, and this book remids me why I stoped reading every dragonlance book out there. Some of it’s great, but the rest is just mass produced garbage that’s made because TSR know if publish so many dragonlance books, they’ll have so many sales.
3 Stars I’ve read better.
Well, there isn’t much to say with this book. I could read it again, but I don’t think I’d want to, and rather put my mind to another Dragonlance novel.
This book starts out with a great beginning, with the Thieves guild of Palanthas being destroyed. It puts an air of mystery on it, and it relates alot with the end of the book. Then it goes into a daring thievery of a rare subsance from this rich guy. But it all goes downhill from there.
Now, let’s introduce the ultra-cocky knight, Arach. He knows everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. He knows more than Sherlock Holmes could even dream about. But he is portrayed as a cliche bad guy, the type who is too cocky for his own good and is easily frustrated ebcause he can’t solve the simplest of things, even after his display of ingenuity, which was overdone.
After this, this, we have the witty all powerful elf, Cael, who has the best weapon in the world, and nothing can stand against it. Att he beginning, he sees a girl, who instantly falls in love with his “good looks” and ends up kissing him at the end of a chapter. (Wow! Free cheesy romance!) Crook insists on repeatedly flaunting Cael’s theiving powers, which gets old after reading it 3 times in the same chapter. And no thief can match him, because he knows how to steal swords, slay monsters, sneak around completely undetected, AND he knows CPR! It’s annoying, because you don’t see the suspense, and it is implyed that no matter what, nothing is capable of stopping him, even the Shoikan grove, because his staff takes care of that. The close calls are extremely annoying, and they happen too often, with things that he always escapes by some extremely lucky previous events, while everyone else just… dies.
Now, or Alynthia, she is one of the few characters I do like. She is one of those hard to get girls, which its into the cliche lines, but she stays hard to get, and you don’t see her getting married and happily ever after at the end of the book. She stays to the guidelines, until, predictably, she turns on the guild. But her personality is overall good, even though she can barely do a thing.
As for the minor characters, they were writted extremely well, but they were minor, and more than hal fof them died, so you’re stuck going, “But that was a great character!”
The plot was the thing that was the most dissappointing, however, in the fact that it started out good and just deteriorated when it could have been easily remedied. Up until Cael gets captured, it is quite good, with most things that are completely original and wouldn’t be found in other stories. After he gets captured, however, I just wanted to take the book and throw it out a window. It fell into the plotline you’d see in the writing of those steriotypical stories of “This guy knows everything, and can do anything!” where you see his wonderful CPR skills. The plot “twist” is something you could see coming a mile away, and it wasn’t even done tastefully. IT ends with the new bad guy dying, and Arach coming after Cael for the nth time, which his overpowered thief skills are thrown in again.
A sidenote: the battles were too short, with Cael just slaughtering the enemy with absolutely no resistance. In fact, the only wound he gets is from is an accident that happened with Alynthia.
5 Stars winner
This book just won the Darrell Award for best science fiction, fantasy, or horror for 2000.
3 Stars A boring series
I was almost tempted to give this book 2 stars but I only do that to really, really bad books.
Like the 1st book in the series, this book was too long word wise. Too many useless description, too little interesting plot movement. Unfortunately, this one didn’t even had interesting characters like the 1st one.
There’s little good to say about this book. There were a few good scenes but not good enough to make the book remotely readable. This series looked & sounded so intriguing I couldn’t wait to read it. I’m very disappointed & feel cheated - a feeling I’m not used to when reading DL.
After about 180 pages, I just scanned the rest to get it over with.
Filed under: Dragonlance Reviews
