I merely tolerated the first book with the promise of a friend that this trilogy gets better and luckily, I believed them and continued to read on. 

Exile does away with most of what I found frustrating in the first novel. Drizzt, while he still has morals and a tendency to want to see the best in everyone, isn’t blindly naive anymore. The characters that accompany Drizzt throughout the book don’t just make the story and adventure better but help to round out Drizzt’s character, too. 

Exile was the adventure story that I had hoped ‘Homeland’ would be and that I hope will continue in ‘Sojourn’