Camber the Heretic (The Legends of  Camber of Culdi, Vol. 3) - Katherine Kurtz Another popular author whose popularity escapes me. I liked elements of the Camber of Culdi series I found in this book but it didn't hook me.

It was only many years later, reading the essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" in Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night that I think I got a handle on what subconsciously bothered me at the time I read it. Le Guin's essay discusses what makes fantasy "fantasy" and takes a passage from Kurtz's Deryni Rising to show what is most definitely not.