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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Bunch of Farmers vs. a Horde of Bandits, Aug 26 2003
At some places I've heard that this book should have been based upon something called "The Seven Samurai," but I simple don't know anything about that. So this review is written entirely from the perspective of one reading this plotline for the first time, which means that there's no comparisons to this so called "Samurai" book or whatever it is.This novel takes its beginning in a small village only consisting of farmers. Bandits looking for slaves for a mining facility comes by, and takes several farmers captive, promising that they will return for more farmers.
One of the captives is Laila, a young woman, which a man in the village called Malek is deeply in love with. He starts out from the village with some of his farmer friends, looking for champions to help the them defend their small village, and rescue their lost ones.
On their travel, they come across the city of mercenary city of Robann, where they gather quite a band of champions. Of those, there is a minotaur poet, a drunken soldier, a kender (of course), an elf hunted by a bounty hunter (and the bounty hunter too), a half ogre, and lastly a hardboiled warrior woman from Saifhum. They all agree to help the farmers protect their village. But for no reward at all! But in the end, they will all be rewarded... The rest of the book goes by with the seven defenders staving off atacking bandits, who have set up camp around the village. What they do, is making barricades, digging threnches, and other stuff, to make it difficult for the bandit army... One of the best things about this book, is that it is filled with action. I'm sure that this is one of the Dragonlance books with the most action in it. The plot isn't very complicated, and there isn't either any real plot twists in the story after my opinion. This is maybe one of the flaws about the book, but its still the action that drives the plot forward. And the action is indeed well-written. In fact, the action and the way the defenders defend the village, is very creative thought out, and it never gets boring. There always happens something new. But some might find it a bit uninteresting to some point, but I still liked it much. And I have to say it...Ezu was a really cool kind of trickster! Something that I didn't quite catch though, was how the mountain range with the mining facility could lie east, if Robann was to the west. It didn't really fit with my FIFTH AGE map. But maybe its just me? One of the last great aspects of the book is the ending, which I found very touching. So all in all a worthwile DL book, which all DL fans will be satisfied with.
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