From the Bookshelf of Project Realms Reads…

The Crystal Shard (Forgotten Realms: Icewind Dale, #1; Legend of Drizzt, #4)

R.A. Salvatore,

Larry Elmore (Illustrator)

Start date: November 6, 2020

Finish date: November 26, 2020

Discussion: Forgotten Realms Reading

Why we're reading this: Published January 1988
November 6th - 12th Part 1
November 13th - 19th Part 2
November 20th - 26th Part 3
[close] Published January 1988
November 6th - 12th Part 1
November 13th - 19th Part 2
November 20th - 26th Part 3

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What Members Thought

Nov 23, 2020 Raechel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: the-legend-of-drizzt, fantasy, fiction, rpg, forgotten-realms

Did I go into this book thinking I would enjoy it? Absolutely not. I had always heard the Drizzt books were lame and for 13 year old boys who want to be a cool emo sadboi drow. I thought I was going to roll my eyes a lot and read the equivalent of Baby's First D&D Adventure: Angst Edition.

I... really like Drizzt. He's a cool character with an interesting backstory and he has a really good heart. It's adorable that he loves his cat and wears a unicorn amulet. He has a good attitude and is an inte ...more

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Aug 06, 2021 Rob rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, games, fantasy-forgotten-realms

TL;DR Version

Crystal Shard is an entertaining fantasy tale. It is the first book by renowned author R A Salvatore and it shows. If you keep your expectations modest, this is a very enjoyable read. If you want to learn about some core characters of the Forgotten Realms, especially if you are playing the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms release of Magic the Gathering, this is a must read.

Longer Version

A lot of things led me to reading this book. I recently downloaded the Magic: The Gathering Ar TL;DR Version

Crystal Shard is an entertaining fantasy tale. It is the first book by renowned author R A Salvatore and it shows. If you keep your expectations modest, this is a very enjoyable read. If you want to learn about some core characters of the Forgotten Realms, especially if you are playing the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms release of Magic the Gathering, this is a must read.

Longer Version

A lot of things led me to reading this book. I recently downloaded the Magic: The Gathering Arena game for my smartphone - the digital version of the card game I got hooked on (and spent waaaay too much money on) back in the 90s. They just released a new series of cards set in the Forgotten Realms - one the primary settings for the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. While I knew the Dragonlance world well from my childhood, I didn’t know much about the Realms.

Anyway, this Magic card game features many characters from the adventures and novels from the Forgotten Realms and one of apparently most famous is a dark elf named Drizzt Do’urden (don’t ask me how to pronounce it). I’d heard about this character enough times that I decided to read one of the many novels about him.

His first appearance, in publication order, was this book - The Crystal Shard. However, in Star Wars-like fashion, this is called Book 4 in the Legend of Drizzt series due to a subsequent trilogy of novels telling more of his backstory. I decided to start here because I wanted to see how this character evolved in the author’s mind.

There is another reason for reading this book in that it is set in the frozen north of Icewind Dale. Also in the 90s I had a hockey website that used the word “icewind”. When the D&D Icewind Dale video game was released. I half expected to get a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers. But the Internet was nicer and more free back then. Anyway, I’ve always been curious about what Icewind Dale was like.

I will interject for you…enough about the background - so how was the book?

Without mentioning spoilers, I thought it was very good for Salvatore’s first novel. It introduces many of the core characters and has some iconic battles. It is also fast paced which I liked. The name of this region of the realms is Ten Towns because there are…ten towns in the region. There is a lot of geography to keep up with and really too much to have much depth of story. So I do understand the criticism of this book having two dimensional characters.

However, the core central characters are interesting. I can see why Drizzt became the most popular character in the Realms. I will definitely continue the series. For some light fantasy entertainment, I do recommend this book.

...more

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May 07, 2021 Don Brown rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: forgotten-realms, fantasy, z-2021, digital, print, owned

The strength of early Drizzt books is what they can be, the ideas, images and possibilities they invoke. In The Crystal Shard, his first novel, Salvatore fails to write a compelling fantasy tale with his simple and often redundant prose. But he does plant the seeds of what and who Driizt and company are, even though he does not deliver on that promise in his writing. Prosody fills in the gaps for me. This book was written for a specific (male) gaming audience that knows the scenes and setting an ...more

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Dec 22, 2020 Nikki ~ The Nocturnal Bookworm rated it really liked it

Shelves: forgotten-realms, books-i-own-read, fantasy, series, demons, my-brand-of-humor

Am I behind on my own reading project? Yes. Will I be devouring the next book to catch up now that work is slowing down? Hell yes.

This one had a more lighthearted feeling to me, and like I mentioned earlier I also found I enjoyed it more that the first. I’m interested to see if a lot of these early trilogy’s all have pretty major big baddies in each installment. To me they feel like if they were a standalone it could totally work just as well.

The interaction between Errtu and Drizzt (view spoile ...more

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