I probably need to go into this review with a little backstory. If you're not familiar with Dungeons & Dragons as a media franchise, here's a quick primer. It started out in the mid-1970s as a tabletop roleplaying game (and is still probably the most popular TTRPG) in the world. But one of the reasons that it's so popular is that it did stay a TTRPG; it also branched out into other popular media. In that regard, it's very similar to the Star Wars franchise where, yes, the original movies were sensational, but the real staying power of the brand was cemented by all kinds of ancillary products. Between the original trilogy of Star Wars films released from 1977-1983 and the prequel trilogy released from 1999-2005, there were several popular book series, comics, and video games that drew fans to the property.

Similarly, the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons increased immensely with the release of multiple fantasy book series set in the world created by Dungeons & Dragons. Most notably, that was accomplished by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman who, in addition to their own fantasy series, have together published more than two dozen books (and several more separately!) in the Dragonlance world, which is based on one of D&D's most popular campaign settings... and by R.A. Salvatore who has written nearly fifty books set in Forgotten Realms, the "official" campaign setting of most D&D content. Most of Salvatore's work centers on the character of Drizzt Do'Urden, a drow (dark) elf who breaks away from his race's legacy of evil and cruelty to become one of the Forgotten Realms' most recognizable and epic heroes.

All that said, this book is technically the first in the chronological story of Drizzt. The first book published was The Crystal Shard (1988), which basically started with Drizzt already out in the world and starting on his adventures. But in 1991, Salvatore published the Dark Elf Trilogy (consisting of this book, Homeland, as the first installment), which was designed to delve into Drizzt's origins living in the Underdark (a subterranean realm where drow the live), and how Drizzt came to escape from that life and emerge into the world above.

Overall, this book lagged at bit in the middle (there was a lot of "let's take a lot of time to show how Drizzt was raised and trained at the military academy and blah blah blah), but the beginning and ending were fantastic. The drow elves have such a rich history in D&D, and Salvatore not only did them justice in this book, but this book has a lot of the ideas about their society and culture that have subsequently been adapted into the TTRPG part of the game itself. So that was really cool to see at the beginning of the book as he was setting up this unfamiliar world. And throughout the book there was a plot of political intrigue taking place that really paid off at the end, and it was really refreshing to see that, in a situation where this could have been a glorified teaser or exposition dump for the series as a whole, that the author still prioritized telling a quality, complete story between the front and back cover.

If you're a fan of fantasy with a political intrigue and/or bit of a horror flare, I think you'll enjoy this book like I did. And if you're a D&D fan like I am, I think you'll love seeing the way the game you play around a table with friends has been incorporated here, from familiar monsters to spells that your own characters have probably cast from time to time. Either way, highly recommended for fantasy fans.

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Created Jan 18, 2025 at 2:16pm • Submit your own review...