Review of Starlight Enclave by R.A. Salvatore

Tolkien was my real gateway into fantasy.  But like a lot of kids in the 80s and 90s, a huge part of my fantasy reading was devoted to D&D tie-in novels.  Outside of the Dragonlance Chronicles, R.A. Salvatore was the king of the tie-in novel, and he created what has to be THE marquee D&D tie-in character, Drizzt Do’Urden.  Drizzt spawned a small publishing empire of his own.  I was never a Drizzt fanboy, but I read a bunch of the earlier Drizzt books and even non-D&D fantasy by Salvatore like The Sword of Bedwyr.  The Drizzt stories somehow soldiered on without my $8, and The Legend of Drizzt superseries is at 37 books, I think, with this latest entry.  So parachuting in with book #37 is a bit of a leap but not completely crazy, and I have fond memories of the early books (especially The Crystal Shard), so when offered an ARC of Starlight Enclave I gladly said yes.

https://amzn.to/3AuQCdw

Unsurprisingly, that context matters a lot.  If you have already read all 36 previous Drizzt books, of course you are going to read this one.  If you haven’t read any Drizzt books, of course you wouldn’t start here.  If you walk in with some context but not full knowledge, like me, you can enjoy this book but there are downsides too.  Drizzt sells books, so he gets his picture (maybe) and his name on the cover, but this isn’t really a Drizzt book.  The tension between feature Drizzt to sell books and Salvatore really wanting to tell another story creates some issues.  The pacing early gets bogged down by Drizzt presence despite his plot irrelevance.  It gets better as the book progresses.  Drizzt steadily gets fewer and fewer pages, with his presence eventually being distilled down to philosophical ruminations.  Which are his real role here, and they do play an important role setting up I assume will be a grand theme of the new trilogy. 

Another major issue is how Salvatore presents the other characters.  His approach reminds me a lot of what Kevin Anderson did in The Dark Between the Stars, another series starter that really continues a prior series.  Neither tries to introduce characters in the way a first book would, instead opting to just sort of tell us what they have been up to.  It probably works fine for readers of the earlier work, but it doesn’t hook a reader walking in already invested in the characters (or even one whose investment has just waned from long neglect).

The plot involves both a book-level quest and the setup for what I assume is a series-level conflict.  The latter gets limited development but has immense potential.  A cadre of drow are convinced that the drow of Menzoberranzan are not inherently evil but rather live in an evil society due to the baleful influence of the chaotic evil spider goddess Lloth.  And they are willing to start a civil war to prove it.  (Whether a race in inherently evil is an important philosophical and practical debate among the characters themselves and could prove a very rich theme if done well.)

The book-level quest is to what must be the planet’s north pole to rescue a half-moon elf/half-drow magically flung there.  You can tell this isn’t Drizzt’s book because he isn’t in the quest party.  It instead consists of Catti-Brie (now married to Drizzt and a cleric), the roguish drow Jarlaxle, Drizzt’s dad Zaknafein, and the assassin Artemis Entreri (now a good guy, apparently).  I don’t want to spoil things, but the quest turns into a very good Lost World story.

My views on Salvatore’s storytelling haven’t really changed: I like but don’t love it.  The main thing he has working against him these days is greater competition.  I have simply been exposed to far more really, really good fantasy than I had twenty-five years ago.  Setting aside the issues created by my parachuting in to the story, my real issue with this book is what I expect is a baleful influence from the D&D tie.  Too much time gets bogged down in detailed descriptions of monsters, locations, and magical items.  So, so many magical items.  (The more traditional fantasy worldbuilding when they reach the Lost World, on the other hand, I very much welcomed.)

Okay, that wasn’t my final gripe.  Salvatore, for some reason, did not see fit to give us a complete book.  Instead we get most of a book that ends not with climax and denouement but instead half-climax and cliffhanger.  No.

Gripes aside, I enjoyed it.  And if it hasn’t inspired me to read 2-3 dozen Drizzt books, or maybe even to finish the series, it has inspired me to reread The Crystal Shard.

3 of 5 Stars.