Christie Golden: Before the Storm

As an active World of Warcraft player before the Battle for Azeroth expansion, this was almost required reading. BFA is over and the next expansion came out like a year ago and I'm just now finishing this book. That should tell you all you need to know about how I feel about it.

Before the Storm by Christie Golden tells the untold story of what happens in the aftermath of the Legion's invasion of Azeroth. Faced with the death of his father, Anduin Wrynn must regroup the Alliance. Sylvannas has become ruler of the Horde, and with the discovery of Azerite in Silithus, she begins her plans. Neither faction can afford a war, and yet it is brewing on the horizon. Can Anduin bridge that gap and establish peace between the Horde and the Alliance?

I... didn't like this book. Pretty much at all. I wanted it to answer more questions about why Sylvannas did what she did, but we STILL don't have all the answers to that, even an expansion later. It didn't answer my pressing questions going into BFA. It further painted Sylvannas as the villain (who they're now trying to tackily redeem in the latest raid).

Other than the story, the writing of this book was sappy. The author threw in tacky love stories where they didn't fit. She dragged out the meeting between the humans and the Forsaken for far longer than it needed to be. This book could honestly have been a short story that focused on that one event and given us all we needed for BFA. Why didn't Bliz put this in the actual pre-patch stuff? Who knows? But this book was meh at best.

I rate it ⭐⭐

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