The Dragonbone Chair (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Book 1)

I was intrigued when I cracked a copy of this open and read a short forward by the author where he states, "things are not always as they appear and only a fool believes they are." I'm paraphrasing but you get the gist...

Well, Tad lied. Flat out bold faced lied. Let me explain to you exactly what this book is. It is a cheap poorly written knock off and meshing of some of the finest fantasy works ever written. He starts with T.H. White's Sword in the Stone. Castle kitchen scullion, people think he's stupid, being apprenticed to the castle magician. Yep. That blatant. King dies. Magician dies (I'm not giving anything away I promise - It's obvious from page one and happens by page 30). Then we move on to Tolkien! Only we are questing for swords not rings in order to defeat, yes, a corrupt elf who, you guessed it, lost his body is still alive and kicking manipulating armies of giants and other things to kill everyone and destroy the world.

Oh, and the religion! It's straight Catholicism! He doesn't even attempt to disguise it or change it or make it original in any way. Usires (sp?) was crucified, upside down, and all the priests make the sign of "the tree"!

I cannot understand how any fan of the fantasy genre can give this "book" more than two stars! It deserves one star for poor editing alone! I couldn't go two pages without a typo. If I had not read the falsification we will call the forward, I would have put this book down never to be touched again by about page 50. I am so sorry to say I read the whole thing.

Please, don't waste your time. Pick up the classics he knocked off instead. This coming from a reader of Tolkien, RR Martin, Pat Rothfuss, Robert Jordan, McCaffrey, Goddkind, Weis and Hickman, and so many other actual fantasy writers. I can promise you, I will never touch a Tad Williams book again. Except maybe to use as kindling.

Yet another epic where a country boy has to go on a quest to stop an ancient wizard who was defeated hundreds of years ago but now is amassing an army. Instead of rings, they're trying to find swords. One of the main characters is a suspiciously hobbit-like troll. Williams should be embarrassed--what's the point of writing a book if all you're going to do is rewrite Tolkein, and do it badly at that?

I loved Tad Williams "Otherland," so I bought the pricier, trade paperback versions of all three books in this series. Initially, his beautiful writing kept me reading through long, uneventful passages...until I realized that the entire book is a gigantic UNevent! Cardboard characters, lame plot, horrible pacing...basically 638 pages of painful back-story. An awful waste of time and money.

I truly enjoy a good fantasy epic story. I was very excited to get lost in this one. However, in addition to it being painfully slow, it was such an unabashed takeoff of LOTR I couldn't take it. I decided time and again to just keep at it and Williams would add his own originality and surprise. I read 590 pages....and then when the good king sent an unlikely small group out on a dangerous quest to find a sword of power in a mountain, that was it. Come on! It was like watching the bad B movie remake of LOTR. Painful.

In all my adult years trolling through the fantasy aisles of bookstores I routinely picked up Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" trilogy and put it back down again. It seemed way too complicated to follow, and I'll admit to being a little biased against male heroes and authors in my younger days.

That changed gradually and then my opinion of Tad Williams changed completely when I read the first two novels of his latest fantasy trilogy [[ASIN:0756403596 Shadowmarch: Shadowmarch: Volume I]] and [[ASIN:0756405440 Shadowplay: Shadowmarch Volume II]].

And then this summer I fell in love with his absolutely incredible "Otherland" saga ([[ASIN:0886777631 City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, Volume 1)]],[[ASIN:0886778441 River of Blue Fire (Otherland, Volume 2)]], [[ASIN:0886779065 Mountain of Black Glass (Otherland, Volume 3)]], [[ASIN:0756400309 Otherland Vol. 4: Sea of Silver Light]]). But I was still nervous about reading this particular series because there was such a vast difference from my beloved otherland-sci-fi versus pure fantasy, normal earth universe verses made up lands, modern tech and slang (and beyond) versus fictional religions, cultures, languages and histories.

But in the end the fact that Williams wrote it override my fears. Which was a good thing because at first this book really did not grab me. The other Tad William's books I read always had some kind of action going on-if it wasn't completely related to the action of the plot then it was background that the reader would really need to understand the rest. But "the Dragonbone Chair" wasn't like that really.

Like his other series "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" is pretty damm complicated. It involves multiple governments, races, magical beings and characters, who all live in the land of Osten Ard-a land that has a long history of settlement by different people. The first who came weren't human but Sithi-a long living magical species. But eventually the growing population of humans stopped being friendly (or even subservient) to the Sithi and started taking their land-including the ancient stronghold of the Hayholt- a castle that has been added too by each ruler but which maintains it's Sithi bones.

For years Osten Ard has been at peace. Most people are united in one religion and all the diverse people seem to get along well. All has prospered under the reign of Prester John, a human man who became king when he retook the Hayholt from a fierce dragon. But John is old and dying-and his eldest son Elias is heir to the throne.

Our main character is Simon-an orphaned servant of the Hayholt who is treated (and acts) like a fairly stupid young teen. But because of his upbringing Simon knows every surface of the massive Hayholt-from the cellars to the very top of the Sithi built green angel tower. Lacking purpose in life he is apprenticed to the castles doctor-a man who is much more then he seems to be.

Soon life goes down hill from almost all of Osten Ard. Under Elias' reign the land literally suffers. People start to fight petty battles and soon there is a larger battle, for it seems that Elias has made a terrible pact with an evil that never died-and the only hope of opposing him may lie with an old league who is unprepared for such a task and Elias's brother Josua, who never had any interest in ruling the land. And Simon it seems has a role to play-one that will take him to farther and stranger places then he ever saw from the top of a tower.

I'll admit to almost giving up on this book. And that's because the first two hundred pages or so are very slow. And not slow in terms of time line-there are big leaps in the time line for the first two hundred pages (they cover maybe two or three years) and then the rest of the book takes place in under four months. It's just that there's no real action in the beginning of this book. There is some information that is valuable for the rest of the book but it is spaced so thinly between Simon's daily activities and other people's political wheeling and dealing that it all gets a little boring.

But I made it through. And the rest of the book is just what I would expect from Williams-amazing. Simon's evolution as a character and as a man is very, very real-he's no perfect hero at all but a boy who is thrown into events beyond his control or ability to truly understand. And all of the multiple secondary characters are equally well developed. Which is one of the most wonderful things about the way Williams writes-his characters may live in a made up land and battle made up forces but really they aren't so different from the average person on the street.

So is it complicated- yes. Lots of stuff to remember-yes (including the usual weirdly spelled and pronounced fantasy names.) But all and all it's a fun book in a series that seems like it has a lot to offer. I'm on to book two, [[ASIN:0756402972 The Stone of Farewell (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Book 2)]].

Four stars.

As a side note-I didn't really notice the kind of dark, sarcastic humor that flitted through the "Otherland" novels and "Shadowmarch"-but maybe that's because this is an earlier work. Hopefully it will be present in the latter part of the series.

I persevered for almost 100 pages. By then the direction of the plot was still unclear. It's like the author just finished reading "Similes & metaphors for Dummies" and couldn't wait to spin bunches of colorful and confusing comparisons. The author is definitely in his own fantasy world, but gives the reader very few opportunities to go along with him. Some passages are so loaded with excess verbage that I had to stop and re-read them even to get a vague idea of what he was trying to say. Don't waste your time or money. Spend your time and money on RR Martin or the Eragon series if you want great writing and memorable storylines.

A huge fan of Fantasy novels, I was really excited about this book. 50 pages in, my excitement had turned into a dreadful sense of obligation as I cannot not finish a book I start.

Reading this book became this horrid chore I had to get over, and the ending did nothing to alleviate or make up for the ordeal I call "reading this book." The author just had to spend pages upon pages expounding on every little detail, which don't get me wrong - I love visual details to put me in the world, but in this case, it was like looking at a tiny map of a HUGE world with all the details crammed within until your eyes just can't help but gloss over everything. For instance, it was like 20 pages of the main character stumbling around a dark tunnel. There is only so many ways you can describe a dark tunnel before 20 pages starts to seem like a dark tunnel - and not in a good way.

I want to finish the trilogy, but I really can't bring myself to, if the first book is even a tiny indication of how the others are... :(

Even my mom, who is a huger buff than I am, thought this book was a "tad slow" - which for her very forgiving manner, is saying A LOT.

Incredibly slow. The worst parts of Tolkien, a hackneyed plot where you don't know whats going on or why, followed by an old man showing up 9/10ths of the way through the book to reveal the plot, completely out of the blue.

I thought this book was boring and slow moving and couldn't get into it. I didn't like the characters either. I might be spoiled on George RR Martins song of ice and fire trilogy. And I began reading this book because he's a fan of Tad Williams. This book is what made him want to write Ice and Fire ! I guess I have different taste than Mr. Martin his book was ten times better than this one. I thought the characters were lame, and the story itself a retread of other works. He does do a good job of describing his world in detail which I enjoyed. I give this book 100 pages, still no interest.I just couldn't get into it.

This book is overrated here, I found it adequate for a typical fantasy read but not more than that. One thing that stood out is the prose seems geared to juvenile and younger readers, who would probably give this book a higher rating because of limited scope of their reading experiences.

If you're looking for a decent read that is standard for the genre, then this book would fill that niche. But for superlative, original fantasy look elsewhere.