Sylvanas Windrunner has been a major character of the Warcraft universe for a long time, and one of the most controversial ones. This book promised deeper insight into her, though it wasn’t exactly what I expected.

Sylvanas first appeared in the Warcraft 3 game, though she wasn’t the first character of her family to appear – her older sister, Alleria, was one of the major characters in the second game (and the book retellings Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal). I did expect that some part of the book will cover her story before her game debut, but I didn’t expect it would take such a large portion of the book. Especially as most of the major and most controversial parts of her story came after that point. This part, however, sheds some light on her relationship with Nathanos, as the background of that part wasn’t really told in the games.

For this early part of her life (and the early part of her unlife), the book has a decent pacing. It’s once it goes into some of the more defining moments that the story starts being choppier – the story skims or even skips some moments that were in the center of the story, whether it was Warcraft 3 or World of Warcraft, which I understand to a degree, but I also believe those defining moments deserved more attention and more internal thoughts, as that’s something games rarely show or tell.

Worse, this includes the skirmish in Undercity, which was a time-limited event in the game, and the attack on Gilneas. Despite being a significant character in the Before the Storm book (review), only the final part of the book is mentioned in passing, and her part in the events of Shadows Rising are skipped completely. The story I’d expect to get the most attention – the sequence from meeting (and eventually dealing with) Zovaal, takes barely 20% of the book, which felt quite underwhelming – while this aspect of the story was extremely “undercooked” in the game and needed to be expanded more, though, being one of the weakest part of the story that made more than a few new characters look incompetent might be hard to salvage.

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Read date: 12.-18.12.2025
Published: 29.3.2022
Goodreads/Amazon rating: 4,14/4,7
My rating: 70%
Length: 371 pages (Kindle edition)
My highlights

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Game tie-in books are always hard to rate, as it’s not intended to be the main way to consume the story, merely a companion. This, however, leaves some risks that this book didn’t tackle that well, in my opinion, with so many skips and skims towards the last quarter of the book. Which is why the rating is quite low for my standards.