With the title "The Book of D'ni" and the last book, "The Book of Ti'ana", I half expected them to go even further back in D'ni's history. Maybe a story about the inception of D'ni! Which, that would be a great tale in itself. Despite this expectation, and not getting it, this still ended up being, probably, my favorite in the trilogy. "The Book of D'ni" picks up where "The Book of Atrus" leaves off and brings us into a world of struggle, rebuilding, and astonishing beauty.

I will make this an uncommonly brief review because this book just grabbed me at every turn I do not want to give away much of anything. Basically Atrus has learned a great deal more about D'ni and its writings. With some natives from other ages he's seeking to, essentially, rebuild D'ni to its former glory, much like his father Gehn was trying to do, rather unsuccessfully by himself. While they were clearing away debris in one area they uncovered a sealed library that must've been there about as long as D'ni has. He had people look through them to see if any of the Ages seemed stable and decided to go visit one. I'm going to leave it there, the mystery and beauty will give away far too much of the story line.

I think readers will be very pleased with this book because it is everything we love about Myst. It has the beautiful worlds, the mysterious intrigue, everything we could possibly want! At this point I could only hope that this would be a continued novel series, but as I write this in June, 2008, that doesn't seem to be the case. A "Book of Miriam" was supposed to be in the works and we got a taste of a first part in the Limited Edition version of Myst V: The End of Ages. So the series was intended to continue! Unfortunately I recently found that "The Book of Miriam" has been pulled and it will not be released. I can only relay how dismayed I am and I will still hold out hope that someone will pick it up and eventually publish the book. With the success Blizzard's video games have had in the world of novels, why can't Myst, a game about books, maintain a solid foothold for the reading public. These three books are held in very high acclaim by readers and fans, so it only seems prudent to me that one should continue with this amazing storyline. That's my piece, if you're already a Myst fan I do not think this book will disappoint in the least. ( )

The conclusion of the Myst trilogy, and sadly the weakest of the three. Whereas the previous two books were heavily focused on the interpersonal relationships and actions of the main characters, Book of D'ni attempts to tackle some of the larger ethical issues related to slavery and civilization-building. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, the story fails to adequately address them and thus lacks sufficient gravity to make it impactful.

The biggest issue with this book is the pacing. As other reviews have pointed out, the plot takes a while to get going and it really doesn't get moving until more than half way into the book. Another problem is that the writing style is loaded with descriptions to try and provide the reader with a mental image of the environments. Since these books are based on adventure-puzzle PC games with pre-rendered graphics, it follows that the books would try to paint a picture of otherworldly places. The problem is that the middle of the book boils down to descriptions of "amazing this, incredible that, wonderful the other," and so on. As a result, it gets a little old and I actually found myself skim-reading through some sections and wondering when the plot was going to get moving again.

Overall, the Book of D'ni is far less character-driven than the previous two novels. It suffers from poor pacing and tiresome use of description. ( )

A frightening moral tale, well written, fun to read, slightly heartbreaking in how very possible it all seems. ( )

Not bad. But nowhere near what I was expecting after reading the first two books.

Whereas the first in the series was a coming of age story, and the second a romantic tragedy, this third volume attempted to tackle the long, slow grind of building a society and a slave revolt in the same book. The seeds of greatness were there, but everything was so compressed that the story summarized far too much. This is a devastating fault in any book, but for one whose theme is the descriptive power of words, of building entire Ages with them, it is difficult to overlook.

I would buy further books in this series if they were published, such as the long delayed Book of Marrim, but I would hope that the intervening years would have encouraged the authors to either scale back their material or scale up the page count. ( )

I liked the first two books much better. This one just leaves me wanting another on even more ancient history. ( )