The Dragonbone Chair (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Vol. 1)
Williams's trilogy bridged Tolkien and Martin, taking epic fantasy seriously as literature while maintaining its emotional scale. George R.R. Martin has cited it as a direct influence on *A Song of Ice and Fire*. The Norns remain among fantasy's most genuinely alien antagonists.
One reviewer clocks that it “took over 120 pages for a character to get from point A to point B,” and says the book does not regain footing until an influx of new viewpoints well past the midpoint. The surrounding cast stays thin next to the page time it gets, “character development feel almost secondary.” Anyone arriving expecting a Sanderson-style magic system finds “little to no magic other than ‘the Art’.” The prose is over-adjectived in the opening stretch specifically. And genre veterans find the shape, lowborn boy swept from a castle into a chosen-one quest, the most familiar possible structure.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
