Eventide (Tales of the Dragon's Bard) [Hardcover]

I found this book in a local bookstore. It's title and cover art caught my attention. I had only gotten to page 20 when it was time to leave, but I found that I already could not put the book down. So I bought it. I read some every day until the exciting conclusion.

I found it to be a wonderfully written story full of characters that leapt off the page. The twists and turns of the story, the colorful characters and dialog - all of it kept me engrossed until the very last page. Many parts of this book were laugh-out-loud funny.

I liked how some chapters were from different character's point of view. You got to hear their stories and thoughts. I loved hearing about the ordinary lives of gnomes, pixies, dwarves, and centaurs (or not so ordinary after the Dragon's Bard stirs things up).
What an interesting town Eventide is!

This book was flanked front and back with two of my favorite things:
1) A map of the town (I love fantasy novels with maps in the beginning)
2) The promise of Volume 2 (due to come out the Summer of 2013)

It's a very good book. Well done, Mr & Mrs Hickman. Well done...

:)

Funny, heartwarming, and exciting, Eventide tells the intertwining stories of several residents of a little town called Eventide. Great characters are the core of the book, and several twists and turns keep the reader engrossed. This isn't a fantasy novel filled with armies, paladins, and monsters, although there is a dragon (or two), but instead tells how the REST of a fantasy world lives.

Edvard the Just is a humble Dragon's Bard, one day he was captured by a Dragon King, Khrag, and taken to his lair. Just as the dragon was about to eat him, Edvard mentioned that he could tell the dragon stories. Khrag just happens to love to hear stories and was more than willing to allow Edvard to live to hear those stories. But, Edvard runs out of stories to tell eventually, as we all would, and Khrag can't eat him, because he's very skinny from telling the dragon stories for such a long time. Edvard convinces Khrag that he can go and find him some stories from the countryside and Khrag, desperate for more stories agrees to allow Edvard to go. Edvard starts his journey in Eventide a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business, it's a town plagued with pixies and full of crazy characters. Jarod Klum is a young man with a dream, a dream of winning his love...Caprice Morgan. Caprice is a wish-woman, one of three sisters in charge of the town's broken wishing well, worried about her widowed and heartbroken father. There are also gnomes, a centaur farmer with a secret, and a Gossip Fairy and a Priest with no idea which of the Gods the townspeople want him to help them worship. This crazy cast of characters will keep you laughing!

I had kind of a hard time getting into this book. I'm not really sure why, maybe part of it is just that it's kind of hard to tell whose point of view you are hearing the story from. You would kind of think it would mostly be from Edvard the Just, but he's a pretty zany character by himself, and it's pretty funny what the other characters think about him. But there are a lot of characters in this book and sometimes the point of view is from one and sometimes it's from another one. Anyway, by the time I had gotten halfway into the book, I was really enjoying it. The characters are hilarious and they are very good at getting themselves into really funny sticky situations. I gave this book 4 stars because I did end up liking the plot and I can't wait to see what Edvard does next!