WoW Insider reviews The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm by Christie Golden

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

10-19-2010 @ 6:01AM

Solitha said...

Some day, oh some day, I will get ahold of all the WoW books.

Some day...

I'm constantly baffled by the reception of Knaak as an inferior writer. His work in the Dragonlance series was astoundingly good IMHO, most notably The Legend of Huma.

The only WoW novel I've read so far is Arthas. I just... it was ok. It wasn't great. I didn't really like Golden's style all that much. It seemed too shallow for the vast depth of Warcraft's lore and the story gaps it was filling.

As a WoW addict, and a compulsive reader who never lets go of a book because I'll re-read it for years - I'll probably never pick up Arthas again, unless I get the full series and decide to read them all in historical order. It failed to impress me.

Compared to that, Knaak is bad? Maybe he really sucks at WoW in particular. Or maybe it's just that taste in reading is as varied as taste in food.

10-19-2010 @ 6:56AM

Kylenne said...

I keep saying this, but I'll say it again: Arthas is not Golden's strongest book. One can loathe Knaak and not care for that book either, easily. Granted, I can see why so many people liked it, because it did have its good points, but I felt it was mediocre at best and really problematic in places (the love triangle especially), which is unusual for Golden. Don't judge her by that book. Rise of the Horde is still the gold standard of WC-verse novels, IMO.

I don't read Dragonlance since my D&D poison was always Forgotten Realms, so I can only judge Knaak by his WoW work. I have read War of the Ancients, the Sunwell manga, and Night of the Dragon. I got Day of the Dragon from the library and tried (oh did I TRY) to read it. So I think I've given the guy a fair enough shake. And I can tell you, unequivocally, that the only difference between Knaak's WC novels and the random crap you see in the Warcraft section of Fanfiction.net featuring 14 year old kids' RP Sues is that Knaak's novels are Metzen-approved so his Sues are considered canon, and the spelling in them is much better. He commits every rookie mistake bad fanfic writers make early in their hobby (I should know, I made them as a 14 yo), and I can't see that he's gotten appreciably better as a writer. Whole essays have been written on why Rhonin is such a bad character, but that's shooting fish in a barrel. He's also just a symptom of a much larger problem with Knaak's WC writing.

I had an even longer wall of text written, but this is long enough as it is. I'll just state that the main problem (aside from purple prose) is the sheer shallowness of his writing, and that every other problem his WC work has--including the rampant Stu-dom and utter inability to find characters' voices--pretty much stems from that. I'll leave it at that.

10-19-2010 @ 7:59AM

Solitha said...

@Kylenne

I suppose, in your search for the technically better, you missed my point:

It's a matter of taste.

The best-written English in the world may not interest a person in the same way Mark Twain might. Another reader might spurn Twain for a romance novel.

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