Curlsofstarlight's Reviews > Sylvanas

I picked up this book because I wanted to learn more about Sylvanas' adventures without having to play the entirety of World of Warcraft or watch hours of cutscenes on YouTube. Unfortunately, I would have been better off doing either of those things rather than struggling through this book. I went into this book with next to no other context except having played a handful of hours of WOW classic and that was simply not enough. This book basically assumes that you have played every expansion of retail WOW (which is hundreds of hours of content) and does not elaborate on events already covered by the game.

Now I do not believe this to be the author's fault. Based on the author's notes it seems like she was very strictly monitored and guided through what she was allowed to cover. Making an educated guess here, the first half of the book felt the most fleshed out and I think that is because it is not covered in the game, so Christie was able to write more of a coherent story for Slyvanas' early life. As soon as Sylvanas' story becomes exciting we the reader are subjected to frequent time skips with no explanation. It wasn't until I was discussing this with my partner that he realized the time skips were glossing over what happens in the game. For a WOW expert this might not effect the fluidity of the story but, for me these time skips made the story almost incoherent. There were many moments where I wished to stop reading but essentially used my partner as a WOW Lore crutch to slog through to the end. Anytime a name is dropped or a reference is made it almost always alluded to something from the game which is cool but with no other context it is lost on your casual reader.

If the book had to skip over content based on Blizzard's guidelines, I wish they would have included references or footnotes. Like hey this time skip is covered by the Burning Shadows expansion! If you're interested we have a playlist on YouTube of these moments. Or something along those lines where if they aren't allowing Christie the freedom of context, give us literally anything to help make this a cohesive story. At the end of the day, if I am just looking at this book as a singular entity, it does not work.