Kendermore

Rating:
Summary: Cute and entertaining
Review: This book was a good find and well worth my time and money. While the characters were a little outlandish and exaggerated, that's how it's supposed to be, because this book was not meant to be hard fact but actually a Kender Tale (i.e. A ficticious story or a real tale that had been twisted and exaggerated greatly). If you would like to see some of the (deliberate) structural plot faults, check out Kencyclopedia.com and search the FAQ. Ahem...back the the review. The book was light, airy, and chock-full of the kender humor everybody enjoys. It had the stereotypical bad guy, the sleazy man out for the money, the flirty chick, the shy guy, and, and course, Tasslehoff Burrfoot. This is a great book if you feel like having a lot of chuckles and guffaws. But a warning: Do NOT thiunk just any writer can pull a kender book off. I must tell you: DO NOT READ "Tales of Uncle Trapspringer" by Dixie Lee McKeone. If you don't believe me, check out the reviews for it on this website. Well...The one downside of "Kendermore" was when my friends wouldn't listen to me quoting the hilarious scenes. Read it for the entertainment value, if not the hard-fact value. Besides...isn't that what books are for?

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly Enjoyable, DragonLance Fans Should Love It
Review: This book was enjoyable from start to finish. I have read over 40 of the DragonLance books and Kendermore was one of the funniest and most engrossing. Tasselhoff is one of my favorite characters and this book does him justice. It was also very interesting to learn more about the Kender and their homeland.

Rating:
Summary: Kendermore...
Review: This book was really good. Though the plot WAS a little extreme and it seemed like Tas's character was a bit off, it was very entertaining and worht the money. It also (like preludes should) tells about Tas's life before 'everything' else and ties up any questions about Tas's famous woolly mammoth story. it's an excellent book for Tas fans (like me) and though it wasn't written by Margaret and Tracy, Mary did an excellent job! Congrats Mary and keep up the good work!

Rating:
Summary: There are others...
Review: This was a very good book, and was worth the time and the money, but there are some better DragonLance books out there that you should read before this one. The only negative thing I noticed about this book was the lack of preparation for the ending. The ending was kind of silly, and there were no really enlightening moments when the whole plot comes together, like in other DragonLance books, which is why I suggest saving this one until later. Though again, it was a very good book and worth its cost.

Rating:
Summary: inconsistency galore
Review: This was the first Dragonlance novel I read not authored by series initiators Weis&Hickman. At the time I was in the middle of adolescense, and should as such be smack in the middle of the target audience for this title.

But even if Kendermore featured Tasslehoff Burrfoot, up until then one of my favorite characters from the other books in the Dragonlance line, I balked at the plot of this prequel to Chronicles laying it upon his shoulders to save the world of Krynn from a menace which should be entirely new to him at the beginning of Chronicles, the first published and founding trilogy in the Dragonlance Saga.

Sadly, the book was just as ripe with other inconsistencies. Tika's wrong hair color has been mentioned, but in my eyes the Half-Orc assassin was probably the worst offense. There. Are. No. Orcs. On. Krynn. Double period.

The first Preludes trilogy (it was only later, after the addition of a second Preludes trilogy, aptly named Preludes II, that it was relabeled a "series") marked a time when old TSR, Inc. unfathomably kept a very firm grip on its intellectual properties (to the point of denying Weis&Hickman the use of the Dragonlance trademark without TSR's consent) and at the same time the company did next to nothing in order to keep up the consistency and quality of new products under said properties' brand names. Kendermore is a prime, if not-so-shining example of this period in real-world Dragonlance history.

(bit of a rant there, sorry)

Oddly, author Mary Kirchoff, who was book editor at TSR at the time, did a splendid job of capturing the Dragonlance feel in her short story "Finding the Faith", found in the Dragonlance short story anthology "Kender, Gully Dwarves, and Gnomes". I can only assume that she did so because she had concrete information to build upon, since the main events of that short story were already told at least twice elsewhere.

Expecting a demanding read from books of a series such as Dragonlance would perhaps be more than a little ridiculous, but even so there are few titles of the series which display the expected immaturity and disrespect to the reader's intelligence more blatantly than this one.

Oh, Kendermore does have its moments. But now, almost a decade and a half later, few of them are memorable. The original characters of the book are its consoling elements, Gisella the dwarf inhabiting the dominant position among these. She was and is unforgettable, and Kirchoff does deserve credit for her.

If you want to read more about kender, I would instead of Kendermore strongly recommend the opening novel of the Bridges of Time series, "Spirit of the Wind" by Chris Pierson.