Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh JohnsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'll be honest: I didn't expect this to be good.
A lot of people who write "licensed" fiction are, let's face it, hacks - and hacks who, all too often, don't have much of a grasp of the basic mechanics of prose.
This author is better than that, and better than the average writer in general.
Because the characters are a D&D adventuring party, it's an ensemble cast. Those can be difficult to do. Giving multiple characters distinctive viewpoints, voices, motivations and backgrounds, and then meshing them together in such a way that they both clash and support each other and all contribute to the overall plot, is not a trivial task, and here it's handled well. The characters have some dimension to them, and they all have believable arcs which are complementary.
The plot trots along at a good pace without sacrificing characterization, though you are expected to be familiar with the world of the Forgotten Realms; its places and creatures and organizations get minimal description. It even took me a while to realize Tess, the group's leader, was an elf, partly because I was left to assume that the people whose species wasn't specified were human, and (unless I missed something) Tess's elven ancestry wasn't mentioned immediately. There's also a good deal of reference back to the previous book, which I haven't read, but I didn't feel lost because of it; everything said about the events of that book is said in a context where it's relevant to whatever's going on in this book.
Overall, it felt like a good, solid pulpy adventure with well-intentioned, capable but flawed characters who bounced off each other in interesting ways.
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