A delightfully fun buccaneers tale, full of action, adventure, and ship battles. It's a great time and fun to read -- the battle scenes are exquisite. On top of that, it's a tale of colonialism and trying to strike back against it. I liked the unusual take on the standard fantasy races, where humans are degraded as "goblinkin" by the golden would-be conquerors Xocanai (who feel like something of an equivalent of elves), and the dwarves are actually redcaps.

On the downside, it has a remarkably slow start, following characters who you can't tell if they're important or not, and the protagonists don't meet until a good 40% of the way through. As a result, you don't develop any real character relationships to hang your hat on until then. It really picks up after that point.

Although I’ve read a lot of R.A. Salvatore, it’s mostly been his Forgotten Realms work (along with The Crimson Shadow trilogy). I haven’t read the 7 books of The DemonWars Saga, but Pinquickle’s Folly was pitched as being a “great starting place for readers,” so I thought I’d give it a shot.

On that note, I found the first few chapters to be a rough ride. Through the narrative we’re given a bare-bones history of the world and the conflict with the Xoconai, but I felt like it wasn’t enough. Even as a long-time fantasy reader, I found myself overwhelmed with details, names, geographies, politics, and races – especially since the terms aren’t used as we’d expect, with ‘sidhe’ referring to humans rather than magical races. That tripped me up a lot before it sunk in. I think if the book came with a proper “what came before” summary, a half dozen pages to explain the saga prior to this, it would have been a huge help.

Once I got started to get a sense of the players, though, the story came together quite well, with a lot of action-packed high seas adventure. At times it felt a little silly, and at times it felt a bit rushed, but it was engaging and fun. I read the bulk of the book in the same time it took me to struggle through the first few chapters, so it’s definitely worth sticking with.

There are a lot of prominent characters, but Massayo and Quauh are the two who stuck with me, primarily because they were the deepest and most well-developed of the lot. This is a doing/talking book, not a thinking book, so we don’t get into the heads of characters the way you may be used to in Salvatore’s other universes. It’s a shame that the cover – that ugly, horrible, digitally-rendered (maybe AI?) cover – gives away part of Quauh’s story arc, because I’d have rather wondered and been surprised.

Not great, but good, Pinquickle’s Folly was a fun read that may resonate better with audiences who know the backstory.

An excellent first act for a new series

Pinquickle's Folly: The Buccaneers is the first novel in a new fantasy series by R.A. Salvatore. Therefore it has two jobs: introduce new interesting characters and their world and tell a story about them, and also solve the Act One problem for the series as a whole. I confess that before Pinquickle's Folly I had never read anything by Salvatore. But it was immediately apparent that this was not his first rodeo. Thus, for me, Pinquickle's Folly was an unusual combination of two pleasures: that of recognizing that I had put myself in safe, experienced hands, and that of a new (to me) voice. Pinquickle's Folly takes place in the world of Salvatore's DemonWars Saga -- a useful thing to know if you want to find maps.

The principal characters of Pinquickle's Folly, pictured on the cover, are the Xoconai sailor Quauh (pronounced Coo-wow or Coo-ah) and the powrie sailor Benny McBenoyt. The Xoconai, who consider themselves to be the Master Race or words to that effect, have recently conquered most of this world. They despise others and refer to lesser peoples as "sidhe" -- goblins. Xoconai control of the seas is not complete -- pirates and privateers prey on Xoconai shipping. As an officer in the Xoconai navy, Quauh is responsible for protecting shipping from the sidhe. The Xoconai are more-or-less ordinary humans, although their faces are brightly colored like those of Mandrills. Powrie are not human -- Benny is one of those whom the Xoconai would call a sidhe pirate.

You can already see from the cover that Quauh and Benny become colleagues. How that happens, and how they fight their enemies is the story of Pinquickle's Folly. It's a rousing sea adventure story. It is somewhat conventional, in that the usual elements of ship-handling and sail are there. However, the battles are fought with weapons very different from those you might be familiar with from Horatio Hornblower or Patrick O'Brian -- indeed, weapons technology is an important part of the story.

Pinquickle's Folly was my first R.A. Salvatore novel. It will not be my last.

I thank NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reader copy of Pinquickle's Folly: The Buccaneers. This review expresses my honest opinions. Release date 16-Apr-2024.