The Dragonbone Chair

Wow, is this series different.

Williams successfully creates something *new* here in epic fantasy. He's emphatically not a Tolkien imitator, nor is he a Lieber or Moorcock.

The world of Osten Ard has the most tenuous connections to the medieval Prester John legends with heavy elements borrowed, I think, from the book of Mormon, but similarity to other fantasy largely stops there.

His main character's special power is that he is simply a good boy, who grows into a good man. He doesn't have a bad mind, he's physically capable if not stunning, but it's his simple human virtue that is his defining trait.

William's take on the Dark Lord, Ineluki the Storm King- is the hero of a completely different story. A hero who refuses to accept defeat or show more to fail his people even from beyond death, a hero who will wage war against history and time itself if needed to right the wrongs he sees.

The Gardenborn themselves? Unlike anything else I've encountered in fantasy. Sure, they are wise and beautiful- but alien, and written as such. Their poetic style of speech makes it completely unclear if their Garden-home "in the Uttermost East" is literally an ancient eastern continent, a planet circling another star, or even a parallel dimension crossed through only by the use of their strange magic. All we know is that they crossed the "Ocean Indefinite and Eternal" and that it was a "black sea."

Refreshing doesn't begin to describe it, but even if written as a straight classic fantasy, Williams is an excellent storyteller; able to make the reader feel what his POV characters do quickly and without fanfare. Recommend highly for the fantasy fan or the highly curious.

This opening volume is perhaps the best of the series, opening the door to a world we recognize but don't, as the kitchen-boy Simon is accidental witness to the deeds of the mighty and wise, and some of the good, and flees for his life after doing the right thing. At the end, he gains a glimpse of his own insignificance, and learns the beginnings of wisdom. show less

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. I might try another work by the author someday, and I think I might have enjoyed this one better in print, but right now I can’t imagine sitting through it again in any format.

Audio Narration and Other Audiobook Notes
The narrator is Andrew Wincott. He was fine, he was pleasant enough to listen to, and he didn’t do anything I found too annoying. I did think he sometimes read the text in a way that gave it a different interpretation than I would have read it, and sometimes I felt like his enunciation could have been more clear. Probably the biggest issue I had was with keeping secondary characters show more straight, but there were a lot of characters so I definitely don’t blame him for not being able to come up with easily distinguishable voices for all of them.

This audiobook really could have benefitted from a PDF character list like I recently encountered in another audiobook. I probably should have searched the internet for a character list sooner instead of waiting until I wrote my review, but at the beginning of the story I was worried I might encounter spoilers while searching for the list. Then later on I just wasn’t invested enough in the story to care what the real names were and I felt like I was following things well enough. But I hate to spell character names wrong in a review, so I ended up looking some of them up anyway.

I spent the entire book thinking Binabik’s name was “Benedict”. I did think that seemed like an odd name for a troll, but I haven’t known very many trolls, so what do I know? There was another character, Isgrimnur, whose name drove me crazy. For quite a while after his initial introduction, I thought they were referring to him as “his grimoire”. I kept wondering how on earth the guy had earned the odd title of “Grimoire” when he didn’t seem to have any magic-related abilities and didn’t seem to have any words or symbols or anything like that on his person. Even after I realized that couldn’t possibly be what they were saying, I still heard it that way.

Story
This was originally published in 1988, and I think it suffers from its age, at least for a reader with much epic fantasy under her belt. I didn’t feel like there was anything very original here, although there probably was at the time it was published. Epic fantasy is one of my favorite subgenres though, so I don’t necessarily have a problem with books that are chock full of tried-and-true epic fantasy tropes if they’re done in a way that appeals to me. This one wasn’t.

It's hard to give a spoiler-free idea of what the story is about because it takes so long to get going. A large chunk of the beginning is focused on getting to know the main character, Simon. I think he’s supposed to be in his mid teens, but he came across as being a lot younger. To be super vague, an unhappy person in power gets influenced by evil people and does bad things, and Simon gets caught up in events related to that.

My biggest complaint is probably with Simon. He started off as an obnoxious, whiny brat. I felt like the author wanted us to sympathize with this poor boy who didn’t fit into the mold that other people expected him to fill and who just wanted to be left alone to do what he wanted to do, but instead he came across as a self-absorbed child who didn’t care how his actions impacted other people. He did improve as the story progressed, but it took quite a while and I never warmed up to him much. He’s also one of those characters who tends to get lucky (or unlucky) a lot. Things just kind of happen to him. He randomly gets into trouble, and then he randomly gets out of trouble, without there being much direct impact from his own actions.

The author also used some tropes that I don’t care for. Simon is remarkably ignorant about the world he lives in. This allows the author to explain his world to the reader by making other characters explain stuff to Simon. Even these characters seemed annoyed about how much stuff Simon didn’t know. The poor boy also can’t seem to remember much. He has various dreams and visions and even real-life encounters in which he gains info that is useful to the reader and would possibly have been useful to Simon’s companions too, except that he never remembers them until the author is good and ready for him to do so to move the story forward. The things he didn’t remember were all supposed to be fuzzy and terrifying and unreal-seeming, so he legitimately didn’t remember them, but it still felt very manipulative on the part of the author. If I’d enjoyed the story and characters more, neither of these things would have bothered me as much.

In general, I also found the motivations for many of the characters to be vague, which is probably another reason I didn’t get into the story very well. Maybe those motivations will be explained better in subsequent books, but I’m more likely to get invested in characters and their story if I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, regardless of whether I think their actions are good or bad or logical or illogical.

I liked Binabik the most, and the story picked up for me after Simon met him. I didn’t dislike the beginning, but Simon was so annoying at that point that he dragged things down for me. It was more interesting in the middle parts, but I started to lose my investment by the end when everything was just a mess and we were focusing more on secondary characters whose identities I couldn’t keep straight. That part would have been less problematic for me in print. The end of this book, not surprisingly, left everything pretty much up in the air so it’s not a very satisfying place to end the story, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to want to read further.

I’m rating this at 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 on Goodreads. show less

This book is full of good old-fashioned storytelling. A rich lazy beginning that made me think of hay drifting in sunlight (hmm, the Hayholt), a chilling turn of events that upends our hero's life, a mad quest for mysterious purposes, and a confrontation with an ancient dragon to top it off. It could have been ripped right from Tolkien to be sure, but Williams has enough creativity to put his own spin on things and keep it from becoming fanfiction. It hit all the right notes, and laid an amazing foundation for what follows.

This is probably the best epic fantasy I've read in a while. It's a little generic by today's standards, but if what you want is castles and swords and journeys and coming-of-ages, then this is about the least embarrassing way to get 'em.

I did find the beginning over-long, and much less interesting than the rest of the book (it's not unreasonable to want an idea of the main plot by 150 pages in, surely?!). Having said that, I liked the book (and Simon) better the further I read. The world is interesting enough, and the invented history feels coherent and believable. There's the feeling of 'depth' without clubbing the reader over the head with exposition. The invented languages are pretty well-executed, too, taking enough inspiration show more from real languages to feel organic, without just sounding like touched-up English or fantasy gibberish.

Secondary viewpoints break up the story every so often, offering a smattering of political intrigue or advancing other storylines for a few pages. They're nice for a bit of variety. However, I will admit to finding the sudden shifts in perspective maddening when they interrupted compelling parts of Simon's story. Memory, Sorrow & Thorn doesn't move particularly quickly to begin with, and the occasional focus on secondary characters makes an already slow book even slower.

There's a fairly uninspired romance subplot, but it (thankfully) doesn't take up too much of the book. Part of the problem, for me, is that the pertinent female character isn't given enough time to really shine, or to develop a more complex personality. I'm hopeful, but not overly optimistic, that she'll get more time in the sequel. In general, I wish there were a few more prominent female characters, for variety if nothing else--this is a pretty guy-heavy book.

For all the grouching above, I'd still recommend this to anyone who enjoys fantasy. The prose is solid, and sometimes even lovely. The dialogue will rarely, if ever, make you wince (a low bar, but one a lot of epic fantasy has trouble clearing). And it's got more castles and swords and boys and horses than you can shake a stick at. show less

Young Simon, kitchen scullion, restless and full of daydreams, becomes the apprentice of Doctor Morgenes. Two brothers, princes, already at loggerheads and when their father dies and the older brother inherits, things start to go wrong almost immediately. He is under the counsel of a monk named Pryrates, as if hypnotized or bespelled by the man and no one can get close What separates this from other fantasies is that Simon is really a hapless young boy through the first half of the book and in the second half he is struggling to live up to the adventure he has found himself in and his younger self. There is a realism to this that has its annoying moments, but I also appreciate it as something Williams wanted to show, a character growing show more into himself. Much to like here, the troll Binabik and his companion wolf. A sturdy plot, three perilous swords which must be recovered in order to fight the fell Ineluki, Storm King, a Sithi (elf) gone seriously wicked eons ago bent for revenge on all humans for destroying their world. The rest of the Sithi, for they have split into three groups long ago, have to decide who they will ally themselves with in this battle. The last 1/4 in the mountains of the north convince me that Williams has himself done some climbing in ice or did his research very diligently, it's very good and the descriptions excellent and convincing. Looking forward to book 2. Not rating higher YET because I do feel it drags here and there, just too wordy. I have hopes Williams will hit his stride.
***1/2 show less

I am not gonna lie to you – this is some hardcore fantasy. I mean, I consider myself to be fairly well-read at this point in the whole fantasy genre thing… but this was nearly out of my league. It was like stepping into this room filled with all sorts of fantastic, historical facts and then made to watch a movie that assumed you had a passing knowledge of at least 50% of those facts. History lessons filled the pages in this first novel, and add into that a fair amount of world-building, in addition to some pretty heavy politics happening and it makes for a book that packs a helluva punch.

What kept me going though was Simon. I loved that moonfaced boy, and I wanted to know what will happen to him. I loved the myth of the three show more swords, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn – for whom the series is named after. And I ABSOLUTELY adored the Sithi – seriously, I haven’t felt that much love for a race of fantasy creatures since I was introduced to Tolkien’s elves. Loved, loved, loved them.

If you are a fantasy reader, and want a definite challenge – but one that is worth the challenge just for the Sithi and Simon alone, I recommend this series. I do plan to finish it – but first.. I need to recover a bit. I’m telling you, this was a helluva read. show less

Orphaned Simon grows up reluctantly in the kitchens and gardens of the ancient castle Hayholt, but his ordained future of brooms and pans is disrupted by a feuding royal family, a secret society, and the stirrings of a forgotten enemy to humanity. And there's elves. And dragons.

I really liked the first third of this novel, which featured kitchen-boy Simon running amok in a huge and empty castle-state. My interest started flagging as soon as Simon left Hayholt and started going through the familiar epic-fantasy motions (e.g. dark forests, immortal evil, elves). It also features some familiar Williams tics, especially the Pynchon-esque vocabulary, enormous cast, and abundant figurative language. (You could probably develop an elaborate show more drinking game just from the frequency of objects compared, in the novel, to either apples or bees.) On the other hand, Simon is a realistically muddled adolescent, and his relationship with the troll Binabik is non-cloyingly sweet. show less