An engaging collection of short stories

As always, Sheila Dearden gives a fantastic performance, with an impressive array of voices and near-perfect tempo and vocal inflections.

Okay, the first thing to understand is that short stories are a hard sell for me. It's not often I find myself engaged with them and I don't usually have enough time with the characters to care about them.

That said, the involvement of a major character from Kingshold in each story helped. Unfortunately, in several of them the character I know wasn't the main character, which made it hard to really care about what was happening.

These stories are really well written and did a better job than I'm used to of pulling me in. My personal favorites were one in the middle (I don't recall the title) about a dwarf beneath Kingshold. It was an interesting foray into Dwarven culture.

And the final story was a nice dive a little deeper into Minawe and provides some interesting historical information about the world.

Sprinkled throughout the stories treatises on how magic works and some of its limitations. There is one logic problem in these treatises, but I trust the author will address this is a later book.

All in all, if short stories are your thing then this is a must read collection. And even if not, you're likely to find something to enjoy here.

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