This book was so bizarre. Anyone who knows me knows that I adore the Dragon Age franchise, so much that my first tattoo is going to be the Hawke crest. But goddamn, this book was wretched to read. The actions of the characters made absolutely no sense. At any given moment, I was baffled and frustrated by their choices, or actively angry at how stupid they were being.

Katriel and the way she is written as an oppressed minority woman is so genuinely atrocious I had to read sections out loud to my guild just to negate the psychic damage her scenes were giving me. Going from being introduced as an SA victim saved by the male protagonist, to one half of a weird girl hate thing, to fucking the protagonist (who is betrothed to the other half of said girl hate thing), all in ONE DAY... I had to just set the book down for a while and think about my life choices.

I genuinely have no idea if the reader is supposed to connect to Maric or Loghain as protagonists or not. Maric goes from being a sort of lovable golden retriever to a cheater without even a second thought, and when confronted he feels bad for all of two seconds, to cold-blooded and ruthless murderer, usually in the span of a page or two per transition. It's so hard to understand his emotions or why he takes such extreme actions out of nowhere. Loghain, on the other hand, gets very little internal dialogue past the halfway point of the book so the reasoning behind him leading Maric down this path just isn't there. So, the book that feels like it was supposed to redeem him or make him understandable as the villain of DA:O doesn't fulfill that purpose. This book only succeeded in making me hate Maric. Was that the point?

Another major issue was the pacing. The first hundred or so pages took place over the span of a day, then 2 years were skipped in a few sentences, and I could barely keep track of how much time was supposed to have passed. Then, what should be the climactic and interesting part of the battle and the eventual overthrow of King Meghren and the Orlesian occupation... isn't shown on page. It cuts to a Chantry mother reading the story to a young Cailan (which... why does this kid need to know about his dad's infidelity?) and describes what should be the best, most intense part of the book, in a couple of paragraphs. I'm genuinely so baffled by this decision.

Other issues include desperate need for an editor (numerous typos, punctuation errors, "you're" where "your" should be, etc), extremely boring and overly descriptive prose, casting every mage as a weirdo or a villain, and not passing the Bechdel test (the least of the issues with women in this book).

To say nothing of the rampant racism--the only dark-skinned character is the villain, the Legionnaires of the Dead are persuaded to go against all their valued cultural customs and come to the surface and serve in a human war, elves are exoticized to an uncomfortable degree... Just yuck. I wish this wasn't part of DA canon.