Dragons of a vanished moon Book

At a certain age, it's easy to look for allegory where none might exist. Are the Dragonlance elves surrogates for the Jewish people? Is the celestial clockwork of Krynn's metaphysics a lesson in Tracy Hickman's Mormon faith?

Who cares.

Dragons of a Vanished Moon brings Weis & Hickman's last Dragonlance trilogy, the "War of Souls", to an end. I'm almost sad to again leave the world these two have created, knowing that this time, it's really over. Margaret Weis wrote an additional trilogy of Dragonlance books that follow on from these without Tracy Hickman, and there exists a back catalog universe of 170+ shovelware paperbacks with the Dragonlance logo, but this ending is truly the ending of the characters conceived and made Heroes of the Lance some 30-plus years ago.

I have no idea what the distribution of duties is when Weis & Hickman co-author a book. Is one of them in charge of plot and the other writes the prose? Does one write dialogue and the other exposition? Do they trade off chapter-by-chapter? I have read at least two dozen novels by these collaborators between Dragonlance and their other fantasy series, and to me they may as well be a single creative force.

The writing is fast, since the story has all the hallmarks of having been tightly plotted and intricately outlined. They have a tendency to repeat character descriptions and bits of exposition frequently, which comes off not as redundant but as reinforcement. They frequently inject humor (sometimes outright comedy) into their work through one ridiculous character or another, but that is paused to a large extent here and everyone plays it straight.

That the "War of Souls" brings a fantasy world of magic, elves, and noble knights to the brink of apocalypse is almost beside the point. Dragons of a Vanished Moon is fantasy adventure written by masters of that craft, and it is a hell of a fun thing to read.

Compared to other current fantasy, it lacks "grim and gritty" and stays solidly PG (maybe PG-13 for violence); the narrative is tight (the authors don't need to engage in extensive world building though a short appendix describes some fantasy metaphysics) and is epic within its footprint; it happily plays on the tropes with which it was built (elves and gnomes and ogres; dragons, of course, and Gods that Walk Among Man). It is not edgy, or deconstructive, it is what it says on the cover.

For fans of the authors and the Dragonlance world, it's as good as it could be, and I'm glad I read it.