Well, the good news is that this wasn't as embarrassingly bad as the unspeakably gods-awful Destinies trilogy. It has a solid narrative, decently drawn (if somewhat two-dimensional) characters, and a bit of genuine banter/humour.
Points for the girl knight, and some other moments of inclusion, and for the Shoikan Grove being back to its usual self. I also got a chuckle out of 'Karn Wynn Fonstad' as I'm old enough to actually own said tome.
But.
This book (like the last three) is just so poorly written. It reads like a textbook, absolutely bland, lacking any energy, or personality, or deeper emotion of any kind. The narrative is completely dry, told at a distance, with no life in it at all: 'And then they did this and then they did that'. Almost all the sentences have the exact same cadence and rhythm, and the endless, pointless, infuriating, fecking info-dumping, explaining absolutely everything as the story goes along, is incredibly invasive.
If you're long-time lover of Krynn, as I am (as so many of you are), then you know this stuff already. And if you're not, then things are (or should be) pretty damned obvious from their context. There's no need to wallop them home with a mallet.
Honestly, the whole thing is just so incredibly clunky. It reads like it was designed by committee, and I go back to what I said about the previous trilogy. Namely, that it's been through forty-seven levels of muddle management and Licensing sign-off, and (almost) all the joy has gone, sucked right out of it.
Which is such a shame, when you consider the love with which all this started (and the fact that W&H can write much better than this, and we know they can).
Footnote: it's perfectly possible, if you're wearing full plate and you get knocked over, to stand back up. How do I know? Because I've done it (and I'm not a trained knight). If you write for an IP/Brand that involves so much medieval/melee combat, please get this stuff right.
Thx.