KENDERMORE [Mass Market Paperback]

It starts off decently enough, with Tas being nabbed by a bounty hunter and dragged back home to Kendermore, but it degenerates from there into a gnome ridden goofy mess. It's an immature and almost insultingly childish story that doesn't really give new insight or development to everybody's favorite kender. Tasslehoff is one of the most recognizable and consistently entertaining characters in the Dragonlance world, and to have this be "his" tale prior to the War of the Lance is doing him a great disservice.

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.