The many readers who loved Glenna McReynolds’ first book, The Chalice and the Blade, may not be happy with my review of its sequel, Dream Stone. But the truth is that, over half the time, I had no idea what was going on. At about page 100 I got so frustrated that I went and read Amazon’s summary of the The Chalice and the Blade, which helped. I can make one recommendation right off the bat – do not read this book before you’ve read the first one.

Mychael ap Arawn is the human son of a Druid priestess. He spent his early life in a monastery, devoted to God’s service. But he is driven by violent visions and the destiny that awaits him in the caverns beneath the mystic fortress of Carn Merionith. In these caverns reside pyrf, the spawn of dragons. An elect few, Mychael among them, know that the caverns also contain portals through time. Carn Merionith and its precious caves are guarded by the Quicken-Tree, a clan of elves. Mychael spends days and nights desperately searching the caverns (for what I knew not) and occasionally suffering bouts of madness. Llynya is an elfin maiden and an acolyte of the Prydion Mage. Due to something that happened in the previous book that is not made clear until somewhere towards the end, she too has a destiny in the caverns.

McReynolds tries to give us the background information we need, in less-than-explicable, passive-tense passages, like this: “Cursed Ailfinn Mapp. Cursed, cursed mage. She’d dared to deface the Elhion Bhas Le, the Indigo Book of Elfin Lore, and the Dockalfar had paid the price.” The who did what to whom? It’s like being pelted with jigsaw puzzle pieces, and trying to figure out the picture as they fly by.

As a genre, Fantasy has become clichéd. While there are moments of high adventure and originality in Dream Stone (and I became quite fond of Nennius, the surprisingly vicious, not-exactly-medieval monk), McReynolds also manages to include almost every single fantasy device that has ever been used too much: elves, dragons, quests, destinies, prophecies, labyrinths, magic swords. Ancient blind seers have been stock characters since Euripides, and oh, if I had a dime for every glowing crystal. . . .

Buried in the midst of all this confusion lies a really charming and quite unusual love story. Mychael is utterly captivated by Llynya, and the former monk is less than worldly in his pursuit of her. He is persistent, stubborn; he resists her, but cannot stay away from her. I’m sorry to say that our first glimpse of Llynya is reminiscent of Disney’s Snow White, but it turns out that she’s a rough-and-tough warrior and, shockingly, an addict – that’s right, she’s a lavender chewer. But these elf girls have tricks for pleasing their men, yes indeed. Although the interaction between Mychael and Llynya was too often interrupted by plot developments I didn’t understand, their scenes together are funny, sexy, touching, and far too few. There are times, too, when the action of the book is truly exhilarating – and once it gets going there’s plenty of action.

There’s an original, steamy love story here, and some exciting fantastic adventure. I can’t say whether I would have liked this book if I had read The Chalice and the Blade first. I didn’t, and this review is for those who haven’t. There were times when Dream Stone felt like the longest book I’d ever read. To get to the good parts you have to slog through literally hundreds of pages of stuff you don’t understand. Weighed down by constant, incomprehensible references to characters and events from its predecessor, Dream Stone sank like a rock.