Customer Reviews

Farthest Reach: The Last Mythal, Book II

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Farthest Reach" continues right where the first book, "Forsaken House," left off. I give this book five stars because it is one of the best Forgotten Realms books in recent time. It was energetic, exciting, fast-paced, and placed in a rich area of the fantasy world.

I believe the book will be enjoyable for both fantasy lovers and dungeons and dragons lovers. The two main paths follow D&D adventures as if Baker was a real Dungeon Master and there were real players playing his adventure. One of the storylines is a campaign of battle and wars, with intrigue between political leaders. The second main plotline follows a group of adventurers following through dungeons, caves, and towns. Most of the main characters are fairly high-level characters with many impressive high level spells. The battles they are engaged in are exciting and just barely winnable. While reading I could keep imagining the D&D players thinking to themselves, "Wow, this might be the end. How am I going to get out of this one?" The good thing is that unlike other recent FR novels there is no random magic that saves the day - just a little craftiness, and a lot of luck (two things that every D&D player needs in a good session. I also like how the wizards and mages must memorize spells and spend time doing so at night while resting, just like in D&D sessions. These characteristics of the "The Last Mythal" trilogy make the adventure and characters more believable. Many books recently have been to convenient and easily handled by the main characters.

There is lots of information and lore that enriches the general Forgotten Realms land. I eagerly await the final installment of this series (as well as the newly announced anthology, "Realms of Elves"). This book will not disappoint fans of D&D, the Forgotten Realms, and even general fantasy fans. Make sure to pick up "Forsaken House" first, though.

In my opinion, this is the best new Forgottem Realms trilogy (though the third one isn't out yet). The Last Mythal is an easy but by no means pedestrian read. A classic Good vs. Evil conflict, the story is simply a continuation of the glorified pitched battles between the Elves of Evermeet and the devils and demonspawn of House Dlardrageth. The reader is shuffled from one huge battle to another, with heroes and villains alike pausing to catch their breath in between. The setting revolves around the ruins of Myth Drannor. If someone has even a passing knowledge of Forgotten Realms, chances are he/she knows of this legendary city.

Overall, an incredibly entertaining and satisfying read. Pick this up, there's no way it disappoints.

This is the second installment of The Last Mythal trilogy. I must say when I first opened the first book of this trilogy I was a little aprehensive. 20 pages into I was amazed and that amazement carried over tot he second book as well. Baker does a fantastic job yet again with this book.

The thing I really enjoy about this book is the elves seem like elves. They are more concerned with themselves than what is happening to the humans. This book does a great job of touching on the political aspect of the elven societies.

There are countless other things I enjoyed in this book, but if I listed them here I'm afraid I'd post spoilers and I don't want to do that. This is a very good read and I'm looking forward to the final book of this trilogy.

This story is made up of two distinctly different threads often found in a fantasy book, and they both are of the highest quality.

The book has a great high-strategy, large army battles thread as it's A story. At the same time the B story is an excellent adventure / dungeon crawl with powerful high-level characters. Both sides of the story are filled with characters with real personalities.

These stories intersect a few times through this book and seem to be leading towards a joined conclusion that really makes you long for the final book of the trilogy.

Well done!

In my mind, one of the worst failures a writer can manage is to kill off a character, and... and no one cares. Not the reader and, sometimes, not even other characters. Even ones close to the person who's just bitten the dust.

It's testament to Baker's talent -- or perhaps the complete and utter lack thereof -- that he's managed this not once, but several times. There're Grayth and Brant, who might have been a paladin-squire pair or a cleric-lesser cleric pair; I can't remember, since they're singularly unmemorable. Anyway, they died. Not that anyone cared. Certainly not I. But, hey, they only had... maybe a speaking line each, so their characters weren't exactly developed. So in this book, we have Curnil, some... random nobody. Who has sections all to himself, told through his viewpoint. Then there's a battle scene where he can't get up and "darkness envelops him" or something equally trite (you know, one of those standard phrases used to signal unconsciousness or death). Then I realized, oh, he's dead.

What, I'm supposed to care? Well, by chocolate, if he had had any personality, I might have given half a damn. At least a quarter of a damn. Not a full damn, though, because nothing in this book deserves that, unless you're talking about "damn" in the sense of "damnation to the special circle of hell where boring books go" or perhaps "damnation! Consign this waste of trees to the flames!"

And that pretty much sums up my entire problem with this book. Nobody has any personality. Nobody displays genuine emotions. Now, the author tries to excuse this on the Candlekeep forum as an attempt to portray elves as inhuman and with different ways of expressing emotions, but when you notice that it holds true for all characters -- whether they're elves, humans, half-elves, demonspawns or potted plants -- the excuse doesn't really fly. Everyone talks in the same deadpanned tone and with identical diction (which tends toward the stiff and unnatural, but what in this book is not stiff and unnatural?). Everyone has roughly the same emotional range (that of a tuning fork). Every battle scene is imbued with the same amount of life (that of a rotting fish a week dead, but less exciting). And the entire book continues in the same painfully humorless tone that suggests it takes itself far too seriously. Araevin continues to be self-righteous and arrogant without ever, ever paying for it; Sarya continues to be a stereotypical villain; everyone continues -- to paraphrase a wittier reviewer than I, elsewhere -- to spout cliches at opponents as if they were projectile weapons. The plot drags worse than most middle books in trilogies and, oh yes, we're subjected to yet another artifact chase (because we all know those are so thrilling we must have them twice in one trilogy), only this time it's pursuing an ancient ritual instead of a gem. That's original, right? The prose, of course, continues to be of the same ilk you'd expect in any Forgotten Realms/D&D-spinoff novels: flat, info-dumpish, overwritten, and sometimes insulting to the reader's intelligence.

I'm just thankful I didn't have to cough up cash for this thing. It was passed on to me by someone as bored as I am with the first book who subscribes to the principle that misery loves company. And with that, my parting thought would be: if you do subscribe to much the same and wish to share *my* misery, get this book, but get it out of the library or from a friend. Otherwise, don't waste your time and go read the latest Harry Potter (which may not be great literature, but at least is more interesting than this porridge-bland offering). Better yet, go read free fanfic, which may not be edited and subjected to quality control, but will almost certainly be better than this piece of published fanfiction. Which, anyway, has its share of consistency errors and typos.

Richard Baker has further established his central role in quality Forgotten Realms novels (along with Paul S. Kemp & E. Cunningham). His book has all of the qualities that I love about FR: depth and history; interesing characters; a real feeling of myth and legend; a plot that holds the reader and begs for more. Nothing about his book is campy or silly. For a fun summer book, this is it.

Farthest Reach by Richard Baker

Farthest Reach is the second book in The Last Mythal trilogy. The first book is titled Forsaken House and the final book is Final Gate. The Last Mythal trilogy is set in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons. Richard Baker has written a number of books, most of which are set in the Forgotten Realms. His Forgotten Realms work includes; the eighth book in the Double Diamond Triangle saga titled Easy Betrayals, a stand-alone book titled The Shadow Stone, a book in The Cities series titled The City of Ravens, the third book in R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen series titled Condemnation, and the Blades of the Moonsea trilogy which includes Swordmage, Corsair, and Avenger. He has written another book outside the Forgotten Realms for the Star*Drive series of novels titled Zero Point. Farthest Reach was released in July 2005 and was published by Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

Araevin Teshurr is trying to understand his new-found magical knowledge, granted to him by the mysterious Nightstar. After declining to stay at Tower Reilloch and learning high magic, Araevin decides that he has learned everything he could from the mages there and sets off to discover more about the mysterious Nightstar. His journey for knowledge leads him to the city of Silverymoon and its store of arcane knowledge. There he meets up with his betrothed Ilsevele and his two companions, the genasi Maresa and an elf cleric Filsaelene, and goes to work searching for answers. Hundreds of miles away, the daemonfey queen Sarya Dlardrageth is fuming over her defeat by the elves of Evermeet. She and her army find themselves in the ruins of an ancient elven city named Myth Drannor, where the elves of Faerūn last met with failure and were forced to Retreat to Evermeet. There she waits for the elven army to come, knowing that they won't succeed in defeating her this time, thanks to the help of a demon prince. At the site of Sarya's old base of operations, Seiveril Miritar is searching for the daemonfey, hoping to rid the world of their evil once and for all. After finally finding their location, thanks to the help of Araevin, Lord Miritar moves his army to the forest of Cormanthor and prepares to take back Myth Drannor and put an end to the daemonfey forever.

Criticisms:
1) Characters. Farthest Reach, like the previous book, has major problems with its characters. There are too many and almost no one has any real personalities or grow during the novel. Unlike Forsaken House, Farthest Reach does have less characters, but there are still enough of them to become confusing. The characters seem to be little more than stick figures, being almost transparent. The main characters only show maybe two different emotions without the story. The first is anger and the other emotion is generic sadness. There are shades of other emotions, but they are fleeting and barely show long enough to warrant mentioning. Another major issue with the characters is that it seems a lot of characters are quickly forgotten. After being rescued by Araevin in the previous book, Filsaelene is only there for two chapters before melting into the background. Another character who appears late in the novel, Jorin Kell Harthan. He helps the main characters in their quest to find the knowledge that Araevin is seeking. However, during most of the action scenes he is in, it seems like he is totally forgotten. We learn where everyone else is and what they are doing, but I don't remember ever seeing anything talking about what he is doing or where he was positioning himself. Finally, we have a side story about a tracker named Curnil. He gets quite a few scenes throughout the novel, but there seemed to be no real point of him being featured. If he wasn't there, we could have had more time devoted to character development of the main characters. Overall, the characters in Farthest Reach were extremely disappointing and are easily forgettable.
2) Lore. Farthest Reach relies heavily on Forgotten Realms lore. It really seems like you need a heavy background in events and knowledge of the surrounding world. This does cause some issues while reading. It causes the average reader to not really understand what is going on. If you don't know anything about the area, the people, or the history around the Cormanthor forest, you would probably be extremely lost. Also, it slows the story down. If you do some research, then the lore isn't that bad and it is bearable. However, there is a lot that is mentioned that you may need some extra background. Overall, the massive amounts of references really does make reading Farthest Reach hard to follow and understand at times.

Praises:
1) Story. If you can get past the character flaws and the lore, Farthest Reach is a very exciting and interesting story. It continues the feeling of being epic and important, much like Forsaken House did. This time, the adventuring part of the novel seems to be the main focus. It's an exciting adventure, that's not in the norm for a typical Forgotten Realms novel. Most adventures are action focused, but with this one is more knowledge and learning focused. Farthest Reach takes more time in setting up the adventuring aspect more than relying on action to carry it along. Most of the adventure focuses on Araevin finding information about the origin of the Nightstar and other things about concerning it. Amazingly this is exciting. Mostly because it is vastly different from the norm and words carry more meaning than swordplay. Farthest Reach still does have action, but it seemed secondary to everything else. It's just different, and that makes the story all the more interesting.
2) Maresa. Once again, the genasi is the only entertaining character. She does have a smaller role in this story, but she still makes the most of it. She steals a lot of the scenes she's in. Her personality is undeniable and gives a lot to these scenes. She's the only one that has a real personality. She's a loudmouth, smart mouth character who effortlessly grabs your attention and holds it. She's just likeable. If more scenes revolved around her, the other character's flaws wouldn't be as noticeable. I just wish she had more to give the story.
3) Political Warfare. I mentioned that Farthest Reach isn't like the normal Forgotten Realms novel and that it relies mostly on words instead of swords. Even with a warlike atmosphere, the treaties, promises, and interactions between the characters seemed to have most of the focus. Basically, the political aspects are more important than anything else in the story. The intrigue and backstabbing the protagonists and antagonist do is really compelling and interesting. The backstabbing that happens with the antagonists of Farthest Reach is the best part. It was interesting to see how the these antagonists try to out do one another. It was almost like a chess game. The antagonists tried to get things in their favor with stepping on the backs of everyone else. All the backstabbing was just interesting and gave the story something more.

Side Notes:
1) Star Elves. It's not often that star elves are brought up in the novels and it's a shame. I think that they need to be in the spotlight more often, because they do seem like an interesting race with a lot of lore and history.
2) Eladrin. It's nice to see an eladrin before they became more prominent in the Realms, but what did it do to Araevin? I don't quite understood what happened to him.
3) Cover Art. The cover art for Farthest Reach has the same problem as Forsaken House, but it's leaps and bounds better. You still are more focused on the white borders than anything else. Aside from that rehashed complaint, the actually artwork isn't that bad. Sarya and the skeleton, I think it's the demon prince Malkizid, look great. Although, Sarya's skin-tone should be a reddish hue and not tan. The flash of green in the background really does catch your eye and distracts you from the awful border. It's eye catching and interesting. It's also the best cover for The Last Mythal trilogy.

Final Thoughts: 4/5
Final Thoughts:
Farthest Reach is a great sequel, with a problem that continues to hamper the trilogy. The characters are bland and have almost no personalities. It's amazing that this book still is really good, even with horrible characters that harm the overall experience. They just aren't memorable or interesting enough for me to care about the majority of them. Another issue, and a smaller on at that, is that Farthest Reach is full of Forgotten Realms lore and if you don't know anything about Myth Drannor or the lands around the Cormanthor forest, you'll be lost. You can still get by it, but it wouldn't be as enjoyable. However, the story is great. It's exciting and keeps you interested. It doesn't rely on action scenes to carry the story along. Instead, the dialogue and wordplay really keeps you interested. That's surprising for a fantasy novel. Once again, the only interesting character is Maresa. She continues to steal the show, mostly because of her personality. You can't help but to like her. She's just great. Finally, all the backstabbing that happens with the antagonists was interesting and adds something different to the story. Farthest Reach is a hard recommendation. If you're a new reader to the Forgotten Realms line of novels, I would say skip it. Otherwise, if you have knowledge of the Realms and enjoyed the first book, pick this one up.

This book continues the Last Mythal Trilogy with just as interesting of a story and just as fast paced. There are 3 story arcs in this book as in the other one. The first is the continued war Lord Miritar of Evermeet on Dlardrageths in their new home, Myth Drannor. The second is the powerful wizard Araevin and his continued quest for ancient high magic lore. The third is that of the Dlardrageths themselves along with the allies/enemies they make.

This trilogy is just as epic as Return of the Archwizards in my opinion. It is comparable in many ways including the fact that they introduce a high evil magical race called the Nilshai just like Return of the Archwizards introduced the Phaerimm.

All the characters are very powerful and you see some pretty heavy duty magic being used. Plenty of action, the author also does an excellent job of detailing the settings the characters are in. Araevin's party crosses a VAST amount of Faerun on their question so far so you might want to get a map of Faerun handy with a Google search and have run to refer to as it puts their journey into perspective.

If you loved the first book you will love this one too. I can't wait to read the 3rd book in this trilogy

This is even better than the first book in this series, a great read, it is a rich and exciting epic whose true force lies in the interesting development of its characters, richly detailed setting, and fast paced plot.
The main character is likable, very understandable and interesting.
This is one of the best series of books done by the Forgotten Realms/Wizards of the Coast, the story is lively and entertaining, the characters are colorful and interesting, and the plot is energetic and spellbinding!

OVERALL SCORE: (A+)
READABILITY: (A), PLOT: (A), CHARATERS: (A), DIALOGUE: (A-), SETTING: (A+), ACTION/COMBAT: (A-), MONSTERS/ANTAGONISTS: (A-), ROMANCE: (B+), SEX: (n/a), AGE LEVEL: (PG13)
*****

Great continuation of a series. The Forgotten Realms is one of the best, with only a few exceptions, settings and works of the genre. Read most of them and trying to plow through the rest.

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.