The Thieves' Guild (Dragonlance Crossroads, Vol. 2)

Rating:
Summary: I've read better.
Review: Well, there isn't much to say with this book. I could read it again, but I don't think I'd want to, and rather put my mind to another Dragonlance novel.

This book starts out with a great beginning, with the Thieves guild of Palanthas being destroyed. It puts an air of mystery on it, and it relates alot with the end of the book. Then it goes into a daring thievery of a rare subsance from this rich guy. But it all goes downhill from there.

Now, let's introduce the ultra-cocky knight, Arach. He knows everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. He knows more than Sherlock Holmes could even dream about. But he is portrayed as a cliche bad guy, the type who is too cocky for his own good and is easily frustrated ebcause he can't solve the simplest of things, even after his display of ingenuity, which was overdone.

After this, this, we have the witty all powerful elf, Cael, who has the best weapon in the world, and nothing can stand against it. Att he beginning, he sees a girl, who instantly falls in love with his "good looks" and ends up kissing him at the end of a chapter. (Wow! Free cheesy romance!) Crook insists on repeatedly flaunting Cael's theiving powers, which gets old after reading it 3 times in the same chapter. And no thief can match him, because he knows how to steal swords, slay monsters, sneak around completely undetected, AND he knows CPR! It's annoying, because you don't see the suspense, and it is implyed that no matter what, nothing is capable of stopping him, even the Shoikan grove, because his staff takes care of that. The close calls are extremely annoying, and they happen too often, with things that he always escapes by some extremely lucky previous events, while everyone else just... dies.

Now, or Alynthia, she is one of the few characters I do like. She is one of those hard to get girls, which its into the cliche lines, but she stays hard to get, and you don't see her getting married and happily ever after at the end of the book. She stays to the guidelines, until, predictably, she turns on the guild. But her personality is overall good, even though she can barely do a thing.

As for the minor characters, they were writted extremely well, but they were minor, and more than hal fof them died, so you're stuck going, "But that was a great character!"

The plot was the thing that was the most dissappointing, however, in the fact that it started out good and just deteriorated when it could have been easily remedied. Up until Cael gets captured, it is quite good, with most things that are completely original and wouldn't be found in other stories. After he gets captured, however, I just wanted to take the book and throw it out a window. It fell into the plotline you'd see in the writing of those steriotypical stories of "This guy knows everything, and can do anything!" where you see his wonderful CPR skills. The plot "twist" is something you could see coming a mile away, and it wasn't even done tastefully. IT ends with the new bad guy dying, and Arach coming after Cael for the nth time, which his overpowered thief skills are thrown in again.

A sidenote: the battles were too short, with Cael just slaughtering the enemy with absolutely no resistance. In fact, the only wound he gets is from is an accident that happened with Alynthia.