With the game Dark Alliance out, sometime in the indeterminate past, depending entirely on when I actually publish this review and you actually read it, I was inspired to revisit the origins of everyone’s favorite dark elf ranger, Drizzt Do'Urden, but then I remembered that I actually don’t think The Crystal Shard, the book on which Dark Alliance is based, is necessarily the best place to meet Drizzt, but fortunately there is another, a better place, a chronological place.

Homeland is the book that begins Drizzt Do'Urden’s story, literally, picking up with his birth, the child Drizzt is born to the house Do'Urden in the city of Menzoberranzan, the subterranean city of the drow, a city of cruel dark elves, ruled over by clerics of the spider queen, Lolth. The third son born to the matron mother of his house, Drizzt is destined to be sacrificed to the cruel spider queen, but when his elder brother Dinin murders his other brother Nalfein during an attack on another house, Drizzt is spared his fate. Instead being raised to worship Lolth and believing the deception, hate and cruelty of the Drow city is the only way, but deep down, Drizzt knows there is another.

Blessed with extraordinary physical gifts, Drizzt is almost everything a Drow male is supposed to be, skilled in combat, cunning, and deadly, but he lacks one thing, a cruel heart, something that Drow society has tried and failed to instill in him.

So I’m going to be honest, there is literally no way I can be unbiased about this book, the character, the setting, the series, everything about it is tied to my youth, and for me, this is where it all began. Years before I rolled my first D20, I knew Drizzt and his panther companion Guenhwyvar, I knew the city of the drow, I had gone on adventure after adventure with the dark elf ranger, and even now, even in my thirties, picking this book back up transports me back to that eleven year old kid who devoured cheap adventure books by the dozens, but unlike so many of those disposable adventures, Homeland still has something.

Using what is frankly a fairly generic fantasy world, Homeland and the rest of the Drizzt books provide characters with heart and soul, plots that once they get going, pull you along with them, and some of the best fight descriptions in speculative fiction. Drizzt, Guenhwyvar, Bruenor Battlehammer, Catti-brie, Regis , Wulfgar , and Artemis Entreri are all icons of fantasy. Even if the more refined speculative fiction audience feels like they’ve grown out of them, you'll have to look long and hard to find a series or a cast of characters who have had the staying power of Drizzt and his cast of friends and foes.

With a triple A game on the market and a new trilogy of books on the way, there is no better time to go back and see how it all began.

I recommend Homeland and the entire Legend of Drizzt series to anyone who wants a little of that old fashioned adventure with an emotional punch you don’t usually expect from it, anyone who has ever been made an outcast, just for who they were or where they came from, and anyone who has ever dreamed the world could be different from how everyone taught you it had to be.