Saving Solace (Dragonlance: Champions, Vol. 1)
Saving Solace (Dragonlance: Champions, Vol. 1)
Solace is booming out of control. An important temple dedication is bringing merchants, dignitaries, and a host of ne’er-do-wells and surprise visitors to the fabled tree-top town. And lately there have been a series of mysterious incidentsÉ.
Palin has sworn off magic and nowadays acts as town mayor. He desperately needs a new sheriff, as the last one has just been murdered by malefactors unknown. Fortunately, Gerard has quit the knighthood after a quarrel with his father, and arrives just in time to don a sheriff’s badge.
Douglas W. Clark reunites two of the most popular characters
from the War of Souls epic in this new novel set in the best-selling Dragonlance¨ world.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars A Fantasy About Real People
I came to this novel not as a fan of Dragonlance, but as a fan of Douglas W. Clark. I knew nothing of Solace or Gerrard uth Mondar before opening this book. By the end, I was fond of both.
Clark’s seminal series, Alchemy Unlimited, introduced him to readers as a sharp satirist with an imagination suitable for epic fantasy. In Saving Solace, Clark bites his satirist’s tongue while still giving us a generous dose of his skills at human observation. Every character in Saving Solace is grounded in the motivations of real people dealing with real problems, making this a fresh novel in a crowded genre.
I love that Clark’s characters prove their mettle not by lopping off heads or defeating fierce monsters, but by doing the right things according to the dictates of their own consciences. I also love that Clark’s Solace captures the feel of every small town, where folks say hi as they pass one another, then gossip after they pass. It’s a town full of characters with turbulent pasts, complicated family lives, and other details that might be left out of a lesser novel.
Some might not like the elegance and maturity of this book, and to them I recommend grabbing most anything else off the fantasy shelf. Nine out of ten random picks from this section of the bookstore yield epic battles, dragons and ogres, sexy elven princesses blah blah blah.
But for readers who find the best escape is the one most believable, Saving Solace is a great pick.
5 Stars Krynn!!
Great book and well done storyline. Humor in fantasy seems a rare commodity these days. Some books have it but only in small amounts. Thank you for the laughs.
If you like books like this one, might I suggest another I’ve recently come across. The Unsuspecting Mage by Brian S. Pratt. It’s another fantasy adventure sure to please. I highly recommend it.
1 Stars Fire the Local Sheriff
This novel is at best, glorified fan-fiction. At its worst…well, it’s very possible “Saving Solace” could kill you with boredom. I’m trying to think of a way to explain how bad it is without being a jerk, but it’s just not possible. I notice everything but will let a lot slide in novels, especially DL, but every single point you could make about literature is horrendous in “Saving Solace”.
Its hard for me to even pick between the prose and the structure, but for fun, let’s begin with structure. Here we have the typical badly set up DL book, with 150 pages for the first act and only about 30 for the third act. Usually this means that the end is rushed and you’re left with a sour taste in your mouth like you’ve been cheated, but since the first 270 pages were so bad, I was only left thinking about how the plot was never fleshed out at all. It begins with the sheriff of Solace dying and Palin as Mayor sending for Gerard to replace him. I wish I could say the rest of the novel revolved around Gerard’s hunt for the murderer in a finely made game of cat and mouse, solving one interesting clue after another, with Gerard slowly peeling away one layer of the murderer’s mind at a time, slowly coming to understand their plots.
But no…I can actually tell you the plot for the first half of the novel with one word: Gerard-ate-a-lot. An entire 150 pages about a man’s stomach…a bestseller if I ever heard about it! Other structure problems also include the lack of any known villain, which always hurts, and besides the food, Gerard’s way of solving a murder is the bumpkin method of fuddling your way through it. Also, we have a romantic relationship forced down our throats “just because”. The whole reason for it seems to be that she’s a pretty girl and he’s a guy, so they must be together! It’s like a law or something.
This all could have been forgiven had the prose been good. Instead, it is the most drab, pitiful excuse for literature that I have ever seen outside of high school. The sentences are painfully simple, running one after another, breaking the oldest rule in the book: “show, don’t tell.” There are many ways “show don’t tell” can be used. One is the macro version, don’t say someone is evil, explain why, and show them being evil. The other, even more important version, is don’t write a list. Its all about fooling the reader into forgetting the tell with a good vocabulary and switching up on how the sentences are structured. Clark never seemed to learn the latter trick, every sentence is plain, and he uses “then” in the worst way. Sometimes more than once in a paragraph. Then he did this. Then he did that.
Final Thought: Stay far far away unless you are the biggest of Dragonlance fans.
4 Stars Good Book, Major Problems
I haven’t read much of Douglas Clark, so I didnt know what to expect. However this was a good book aside from a few minor problems.
1. Where the hell is Mirror??? In Dragons Of A Vanished Moon, we get the point that Odila and Mirror are working together to help free Silvanesti. The “Odila is a cleric of Mishakal” was ok, but why isnt Mirror with her? Also, we dont get much of her as I would like.
2. We all know series are to be continued. In the first book of the Elven Exiles, THe Lioness is spirited away by magic, giving us questions such as: Who took her? Why did he take her? Where did he take her? Why her? In this book there is nothing. We get a sheriff murdered and solve the crime. Nothing else. The girl that Gerard is apparently taken with joins Odila to be a priestess and Odila is leaving since the temple is finished. We’ve got nothing to look forward to.
3. This is a very minor point but to me, it is important. The Map. At the beginning of the book, we get a map, as always. It lists places such as: The Temple Of Majere, The Temple Of Hiddukel, A Shrine to Zeboim, The Ruined Academy Of Sorcery, A Hylar House Inn, The Fiddlers Inn. These places are of no importance whatsoever in the book.
5.Too much of the book was centered on Gerard not liking this food which he was forced to eat, and not liking this, and not liking that. Does that really help us? I don’t think so.
Still, it was overall a rather good book, and I’m happy I bought and read it.
4 Stars Well met…
Having never read a Dragonlance novel prior to this one, I was surprised at how quickly I fell in love with the characters and began wondering about their backgrounds. I was more familiar with the Forgotton Realms charcters, Drizzt and Elminster. I quickly overlooked these at the marvel of reading about a white dragonThe Great White Wyrm (Dragonlance: Champions, Vol. 3), but I wanted to get the scoop from the beginning of the series. So I started here in Solace, and I must say, it proves to be a satifying adventure. While the book wastes too much time speaking of Gerard’s dislike of spiced potatoes, this can be overlooked as I’m sure Clark was simply trying to tie two series together with a familiar food item. I found Gerard’s love interest a little underdeveloped (actually wondering why that part of the plot was included at all…), and some of his thought processes unexplained (e.g. How he came up with who murders who; some important dialogues are simply left out in place of more conversation about potatoes).
All in all, this book was slow in the first half, but by the time I got to the last 100 pages or so, I simply could not put it down. This is a suggested read that will draw you into the world of the Dragonlance novels if you are not already immersed in them 
Filed under: Dragonlance Reviews
