Customer Reviews

The Silver Stair (Dragonlance Bridges of Time, Vol. 3)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This book was good and bad. I have a few bad things to say about it first. I didn't like how she broke her own rules of Krynn she put in her trilogy. Goldmoon was much to powerful for a world with more magic. It would probably take generations to get over the shock of the gods leaving and decades more of research to get clerical power. I understand a little magic, but it sounded as if she could beat Palin in a magical duel. Enough about magic, I found Gair's descent into evil much too quick and unrational. He didn't seem to have a reason to hate everybody all of a sudden. I haven't read the book in 6 moths, but if his reason was good I think I would remember it. Also, this isn't the best written book I have read it seemed too rushed. Now about the good parts in the book. It was a good fantasy with action, magic, and undead. A DL fan should read it, but I don't recoment it for anyone else. P.S. It was a good recovery for Jean Rabe after the FA trilogy. If she would have written another book like those I would have given up my faith in her.

Having read Rabe's DRAGONS OF A NEW AGE trilogy and now this, I've come to the conclusion that she has a difficult time writing characters that act like actual people would. This tended to improve as the aforementioned trilogy progressed, but it was terrible in this book. What I mean by this is, if something strange or suspicious occurs, most people would stop and question it. However, Rabe's characters tend to blithely continue on with what they were doing and don't give it a second thought. Very very frustrating to read when you know that it needs to be questioned. It's as if Ms. Rabe just wants to get where she's going and she completely disregards the fact that she needs to make her characters act like normal people in order to make them believable. This makes it very difficult to become emotionally involved with either the characters or the story. I'm guessing that this is one of her early works because, by the third book of DRAGONS OF A NEW AGE, her characters were behaving more reasonably.

The other thing about this book that caused me to dislike it so much was the fact that her main elf character, Gair, didn't act like an elf at all. He was impatient, impetuous, and, for someone who claimed to be a scholar in the field of magic, tended to jump right in to doing something without even considering the consequences. These characteristics are all the complete opposite of those describing an elf. They are more along the lines of a human. If you're going to create a character and assign them a race and you want them to be believable, they have to have at least some of the characteristics of that race. Gair seemed to have none. I felt no sympathy for him whatsoever. I am sure this was not Rabe's intent, but she fell completely flat in attempting to make me connect with the character.

Finally, since Gair was such an integral part of the plot and Ms. Rabe was forcing him into acting so unlike an elf, the whole story just seemed to contrived. It was simply a way of establishing Goldmoon's Citadel of Light for use in subsequent books. A story had to be created to put these pieces into place. The bad characterization just made it blatantly obvious to the reader that the whole point of the book was to get to the ending point. Unfortunately, Rabe's handling of the characters just made the journey unpleasant and unbelievable.

It was a decent story, but nothing to get excited about. The execution could have been light years better. Unless you're a hardcore Dragonlance fan, you can probably skip this book and not miss much (if anything).

As a writer, Jean Rabe either runs hot or cold. There's no middle ground with her. Her novel Marquesta Kar-thon: I started reading & then quit. I'll go back & read it sometime. Her 5th Age trilogy was god-awful stupid.

On the other hand, her Dhamon trilogy - while I haven't read them yet - sounds promising. This book is very good. You know there's a threat to Goldmoon but you don't know where it's coming from until springs up. I was completely surprised.

The characters are well-developed, the plot's strong & it draws you in. The rules by which they recieve their clerical powers in this book actually makes sense unlike the rules they made for the wizards in the 5th Age. A good read.

The characters are all shallow and the story is poorly written. The elf goes from being an inheritantly good person to the most evil person in the world in one chapter for no apparent reason. He also gets whacked in the knee 5 or 6 times with a hammer then two pages later is out running someone. You gotta wonder why TSR lets her continue to write for the dragonlance series, I have not read a good book from her yet.

Despite a few flaws I found this book quite entertaining. Following Gair's story was a very interesting read, and if this is how the Age of Mortals trilogy is like I'm sure it's hardly as bad as some people say. One thing that was odd, how was the mage at the start using magic as he did?

This book started off a bit slow, but picked up pace around the third chapter. I liked it much more than I thought I would, and found it to be entertaining even though one of my friends `accidentally' told me some of the story. Basically this novel by Jean Rabe focuses on the fall of Gair (a Silvanesti Elf) to the dark side of mysticism with the building of the Citadel of Light in the background. Some new characters are introduced, such as a Gnoll and another Solamnic Knight and Jasper Fireforge and Goodmoon make re-appearances.

This is also a very good information book on the workings of Mysticism, which makes it pretty much a must buy for any Fifth Age fan. If you aren't that big on the Fifth Age then it's still a good read with plenty of interesting characters and lots of spirited fighting.

The only thing that I didn't like about this novel was the length. Typical of the Bridges of Time series the ending seemed a bit rushed and not as full and as deep as it could have been. But other than that, it's a good DL book by Jean Rabe.

I never even finished Jean Rabe's Fifth Age Trilogy, and after all the bad comments this book got, I must say I was pretty hesitant to get it. But I did, and after a slow start, I finished the book in one night. I guess it's pretty obvious that I enjoyed it a lot, don't let the sappy cover fool you, this was one of the darker Dragonlance books I've come upon. Gair has got to be one of the more interesting characters ever created. If you can just look past all the historical inacuracies mentioned, blasphemies actually, I think you'd really enjoy this book.

Jean - I just finished your book and I have to say it was FANTASTIC. I have a thing about books, there are some books that are blah (I start reading them and put them down and never finish), then there are the books that are okay (I can read several of them at a time - they only interest me a little bit). Next we have the good ones (they're the ones I leave on my night stand and I read those at night if I'm not too tired). Finally we have the OH MY GOD THIS IS SO GOOD I CAN'T PUT IT DOWN (these are the books that I carry in my purse. The books that I read every chance I get. These are the books with the potential of getting me fired because I'm reading them instead of the reports - you know the comic book in the history book routine). Seriously Jean, this is a great story. You are a very gifted writer and I enjoyed your book immensely. I felt like I was there seeing it all.

Once again, Jean Rabe proves that she cannot write books...and that the editors at TSR do not actually read the books. There were events; but I didn't see a plot in this book. A lot of inconsistencies are in this book. Plus, the writing is just bad.

Rabe tells a better story than her awful fifth age trilogy, but the caracters are still too thin and child-like, the plot too dull and the inconsistency with all preceeding dragonlance still abound. Is there no editor at TSR who read those books and tells Rabe that there wasn't any Knights of Takhisis in 352!!!

I hope that the War of Souls trilogy by Weis & Hickman comes out soon to clean Rabe's mess up once and for good. It was a mistake to hire an author without any feel and any knowledge of Krynn.

Read the Chaos War Series instead. Those books rocks!