Elminster: The Making of a Mage
You never expect a D&D novel to be high literature, but this is bad even by their standards.Follows Elminster as he starts on his path to being the greatest mage in the whole Forgotten Realms, and that is where it lets itself down. For all of the danger he finds himself in, you KNOW he's going to come out of it.
Any sense of suspense is non-existent as he goes from one quest to the next (usually with someone helping him along - on his own he's pretty useless).
The dialogue is pretty dire and characters (main and background) are standard D&D stereotypes. No-one is fleshed out very well.
