Fairly standard fantasy quest. Instead of a hapless hero who has been raised ignorant of his destiny, we have three hapless heroes (okay, one is a girl) who have been raised ignorant of their destinies. They all grew up in the same backwater hamlet and within a period of weeks they are all trotted off on their quest(s). Unfortunately, their quests never become particularly clear to the reader. There must be more volumes - after all, he committed that crime of series fiction and left things hanging over the cliff. Maybe that is just tradition. Tolkien did it, so it must be the way it is done.
The prologue was very engaging - the backlash from a great working of magic wipes out the center of civilization and a minor wizard survives and is washed up on the shore near the aforementioned hamlet. Gradually, we discover that not only was she swept across the sea from destroyed Yole, she was swept a thousand years out of time. Unfortunately, she remains a fairly minor character. She does become the quest guardian for one of the three; the local hermit accompanies another; and the third picks up a six- inch tall redheaded invisible (to everyone else) sprite for his companion.
This went off into "Volume II" mode fairly early on - switching precipitously among the three crisis-rich quests. It wasn't particularly difficult to follow the three threads; there was just that jolt at the beginning of each and every chapter - okay, where are we now?
Drake produced some fairly nasty bads, including some insectile zombies, revived by a careless wizard. My biggest problem with it is that at the end of volume one we really don't know where he is headed.
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