The Messenger by Douglas Niles

The stereotypical warrior woman in a sexist culture opens the story with the traditional battle of wills against her father’s decision to exclude her from men’s work. Coincidentally, she’s the only one with significant hunting/fighting skills to survive when the ogres show up and wipe out everyone who was unable to hide before they landed. With only women and children left, they have to find a place to survive the fatal “Sturmfrost” that comes every winter, so they head for the mythical hotspring toward the North, being wary of the walrus-like Thanoi and the also-sexist Highlanders, whose leader has decided he wants to marry this woman so much that he won’t take no for an answer.

A disgraced and mercenary elf encounters a bizarrely mysterious kender out on the open sea, and they find themselves sailing so far south, they end up at the northern end of the icy realm where the women and children capture the elf. They manage to make a deal, and when things look to have settled down, the Highlanders show up and take over. Their presence turns out to be convenient when the Ogres show up, though, and the battle for the humans’ survival is fierce and desperate. The elf gets answers to questions long thought unanswerable, and the humans manage to reclaim an ancestral stronghold.

Overall satisfying, but there is way too much of the ogres and their internal issues. It seems to be a frequent issue with Dragonlance books - the insistence that good and evil are equivalent tends to lead to the authors’ spending equal time with both sides, when the reader only really cares about the heroes’ feelings and motivations and plights.