Customer Reviews

The Calling (Dragon Age)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Full disclaimer: As someone obsessed with the DAO universe, my review is biased because I already have an attachment to this world and its characters. I devoured the first book and loved it, but this book just had me fluttering about like an excited if demented pigeon.

On the surface, the story seems simple. A King guides a motley crew of Grey Wardens through the treacherous Deep Roads to help them find a missing Grey Warden. But what it is, is so much more. It is about loss and regret, it is about trust and friendships. It is about how far a person will go to do the right thing, and how far a person will go to correct his or her mistakes. It leaves you with a feeling of uncomfortable uncertainty about the nature of evil and of good. And if you are a dog lover, it has a scene that will leave you misty eyed if not a complete emotional wreck.

In the end, it leaves you with a satisfying sense of closure, but you will see the Thedas universe with new eyes. No longer will you see the darkspawn as pure evil. No longer will you see those who defend humans against them as pure good, and suddenly, everything in the Dragon Age universe just acquired a patina of nuance that was until now not quite obvious.

And even if you are not into the Dragon Age universe, it is still an entertaining, action packed fantasy romp. Mr. Gaider's style is very confident and assertive in this book, his story is very expansive and lore filled, and yet he never loses his strengths- great interactions, a very intimate sense of story telling and characters that you will feel for strongly whether you want to hug them, or slap them silly.

I really enjoyed this book.

David Gaider did a tremendous job on this story, surpassing The Stolen Throne in all respects. The storyline will engross you and make you want to keep reading, and you find yourself truly wondering about what you really know about this world, the darkspawn, and the Grey Wardens. It should be required reading before playing Dragon Age, and also stands on its own as a worthy novel for those who enjoy adventure. Highly recommended.

If you're looking for a fantasy novel and have not played and enjoyed Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins game, avoid this novel. If you fit this category, I give this novel two stars. Without the game's support, the novel cannot stand on its own. The characters are flat, the setting is not well fleshed out, and the story itself is uninspiring.

On the other hand, if you a Dragon Age fan, and are looking for more back story about the world of Thedas, then this is a pretty good read. If you're looking to expand your Dragon Age experience, then I give this novel 4 stars.

Averaging out the two ratings, I give this one a 3 overall.

While the story seems simple enough for a fantasy novel, David Gaider's excellent writing style pulls the book through. Character interactions and an extensive lore are appearing as major strengths in his writing. I would heartily recommend reading this to anyone, not just fans of Dragon Age: Origins.

Review for the Audio version.

Tantor media delivers with a good narrator and a fluid, interesting reading. For battles, he reads faster, and assigns different voices for characters.

In my review of the Stolen Throne, I felt Graider didn't do particularly well with character development. The Calling shows growth in writing style. I honestly felt like there was improvement, and the characters had description and more substance.

The plot was not particularly strong. You probably won't find yourself thinking: "Wow, I never would have seen that coming!" but it is entertaining. It's classic with the Dungeons and Dragons feel, all the way down to the monk, the thief, the barbarian, the wizard, and the warrior creating an adventuring party. All they were missing was a Cleric, so there was a king and dog thrown in. Even the hound was better developed than the last batch.

I will never forget Bram Stoker's love affair with a single word in Dracula. Mr. Stoker had a fond fascination for "voluptuous." It felt like every time you turned the page, you would run into it. Mr. Graider has a similar fascination with "ichor." It's a fantastic word and very descriptive. However, a little less ichor and a little more thesaurus might have been wise.

My subjective opinion was that the characters were not heroes, and I enjoy a book with a strong protagonist. While I don't look for a character to be perfect, I prefer someone who is a lighter shade of grey. When I plugged in the Dragon Age game the very first time and heard the voice of Duncan filling my headphones saying "... and then the Grey Wardens came..." it gave me pleasant chills. I wanted to play a Grey Warden!

Most of these aren't that kind of Warden. They're spineless in some cases, cowards in others, or just insane. Young Duncan was a clone of Daveth. The decision of the dwarven woman at the end struck me as making no sense what-so-ever. I would have thought having her family slaughtered by the ancient enemies of her race in front of her would have prompted her to fight against them, not sign up for their cause.

As a fantasy novel, I would say it's certainly worth a read, but the author needs to stretch his wings a bit more before he's ready to run with the giants of this genera.

Now from the viewpoint of someone who has completed 97% of the game and been through it 9 times. Minor spoilers below.

Don't expect the game universe and the novel universe to line up. Dwarven monks? It's hinted in the book that the Shaperate is able to work magic, but the game leads to believe that's impossible. Perhaps that's not the case and they merely use magical tools. I can easily let that slide. These are small things, but the largest problem is the suggestion of Alistair's heritage.

Perhaps the child at the end isn't Alistair at all, but it's strongly hinted that he is. This creates some major conflicts with the game universe. When you have Loghain in your party, he tells the Warden Maric knew about Alistair. He didn't acknowledge the illegitimate boy because it would have broken Rowan's heart. Rowen had passed away by the time the child in the Calling was conceived. There's also Goldanna, and where I could dismiss the charge of non-consent as a bitter, angry woman, she tells Alistair she knew about him at birth. Even if Goldanna wasn't related to him at all, things simply fall apart if you try to merge the novel and the game on that topic.

Perhaps some day Graider or Bioware will come out and say "we decided it's this way" and that will be an end to it. For now, I'd suggest treating them as two different entities much as a book and a movie. There's no reason not to enjoy them both independently.

An engrossing novel set in the Dragon Age universe that both adds to and enhances the story of the video game. Dragon Age: The Calling picks up several years after the events of Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne and answers several questions that were left at the conclusion of the previous novel. The characters that are present in the original novel are given more depth and further fleshed out as "living" people with flaws and triumphs. I will say that this is a story written entirely for fans of the universe. If you did not enjoy Dragon Age: Origins the game or Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne (novel) this book is unlikely to please you. While the story does a good job of introducing each new character it has little in the way of inviting new readers, so, if you want to read this book either read the first one or play the game (preferably both!!!...book first though). All in all this is an exciting book about a dark fantasy world known as Thedas and is set primarily in a barbarian country known as Ferelden, which fans of D&D type storylines should enjoy.

I've never been so conflicted while reading a book. On the one hand, this is one of the most tedious things I've ever read, but on the other, it's given me a greater understanding of the lore of Dragon Age. And it's made me appreciate the game a lot more, as well. I feel satisfied, frustrated, happy, sad. I love and hate this book.

As a brief intro: THE CALLING is a novel based in the Dragon Age RPG setting created by the fine folks at BioWare. This is also the second novel in a series: a series primarily created to complement the video game. Because this book draws so heavily upon its prequel, and even more so upon the video game, there is almost no chance that someone who isn't a fan could pick up this book and know exactly what is going on. This book occupies a very limited niche.

But onto the story itself. It chronicles the return of the Grey Wardens to Ferelden, after the Orlesians were forced out of the country over a decade ago. We're introduced to a young Duncan (who fans of the game will definitely remember), his commander, and a few others who comprise the group. Their purpose in returning to Ferelden is to ask King Maric's assistance in tracking down one of their order, who was captured in the Deep Roads. Maric agrees to help them out, since it's possible they could put a stop to a Blight in the process. So, the group ventures into the Deep Roads, where they run into darkspawn aplenty, and a few mysteries that will definitely leave fans intrigued.

I would call myself a hardcore fan of the Dragon Age property. The game is one of my favorites, and the world (while derivative in some regards) is well thought out with a rich history to it. I read Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne and liked it. THE CALLING nearly made me rip the book in half, thereby separating the tedious part from the intriguing part.

The first half of the book is bad to the point of hilarity. The setup for everything is so forced that I couldn't believe it was happening. The Grey Wardens need Maric or Loghain to lead them through the Deep Roads. Never mind the fact that it's been fourteen years since they rather hastily made their way through the ruins. The Wardens need them, even if they don't remember anything. They make that resoundingly clear. And Maric actually agrees to this?

Combined with how Duncan - the stoic, noble and steadfast leader from the game - is set up as the book's comedy relief (which I did NOT see coming), that most of the first 200 of the 400 pages of the book are spent retelling events from the last book, and that most of the characters are hardly even provided personality...I was ready to put the book down.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: David Gaider is a great writer. While being the Lead Writer of two games back-to-back, and then writing two novels on top of that, he puts out fine work each time. But the main problem with this book (to me), like the last one, is that he spends far too much time laying on the exposition. The book jumps the story ahead by days at a time, but then goes about recapping those missed days anyway. Backstories are added in at random intervals. And the characters spend many pages thinking about things when the mood is supposed to be tense. All of the recapping, history lessons, and the lengthy internal narrative really broke up the action.

But things really started to pick up in the last half, when there was a little less conversation and a little more action. The book stopped trying to make me privy to all of the innumerable relevant details (most of which I had already known) and just tells the story. Characters begin interacting, the story speeds up from a crawl to a sprint, and the lore is expanded upon massively. I actually had some emotional investment in some of the characters in the end, which I didn't have in the first half.

And the epilogue will have fans of the game grinning, I can almost guarantee it.

So, I think I can safely recommend this book to fans of the game, but that's about it. There are some heartfelt moments, genuine tear-jerking scenes, and some times where the book really captured the spirit of the game. It gets three stars for me, because no book should take 200 pages to hook a reader, but when it finally did, it felt like it was worth the wait.

Fans of 'The Stolen Throne' expecting more of the same may be disappointed by 'The Calling,' the structure and plot of which exacerbate what were minor weaknesses in 'Stolen Throne.' The narrower scope of this novel doesn't give Gaider the opportunity to show some of his strengths that were more visible in the first book.

The overriding feel of this book is that it reads like Gaider is narrating a D&D campaign. The epic scale of 'Stolen Throne' is gone, as 'The Calling' follows King Maric and several Gray Wardens underground on a fairly vague, if urgent-sounding mission. It seems as though much of the story is meant to introduce you to the Gray Wardens, a central group in the 'Origins' video game so prominently featured on the book's cover. The Calling does succeed at that, as the various wardens and their diverse backgrounds and feelings about their duty give a far more thorough telling of who and what the Wardens are than does the game.

Unfortunately, this pre-game exposition comes at the cost of The Calling's viability as a standalone story. The plot is contrived; the presence of Maric (the only character from 'Stolen Throne' to make anything more than a token appearance) is explained away with the flimsiest of excuses, and just about every character in the book has a sense of 'what are we doing here?' which they even go so far as to voice aloud on more than one occasion. The story and its consequences have few repercussions on the Dragon Age world, and very little of value of learned about anything or anyone. It's a dungeon crawl: expect many, many paragraphs devoted to 'and she laid down a healing spell' or alternative descriptions of stabbing things. Even an arbitrary battle with a dragon fails to capture much urgency, as one of the characters rightly identifies at the time that there is no reason at all for them to be fighting it.

Stolen Throne was excellent in its introduction to a new, well-designed fantasy world on a properly epic scale. If anything, it suffered from aiming to high, and trying to do too much with too few pages. The Calling has the opposite problem: it does very little in the same number of pages. So many characters and potential loose ends were introduced in Stolen Throne that focusing on a few of them for a new novel shouldn't have been difficult to do; instead, we get all new characters and the one hold-over who needed more story far less than some of the others.

On the positive side, Gaider's style and characterization can sometimes surprise you with sudden, brief moments in which a character will say or do something poignant or insightful. These 'show me rather than tell me' moments are where his characters succeed, though some work better than others or are redundant, as Maric's years-later agonizing over a dalliance with and betrayal by a character from 'Stolen Throne' will show.

Ultimately, the central conflict in The Calling is a weak one, and some of the characters are cliche dungeon-crawl-party fare, a trap Gaider deftly escaped in 'Stolen Throne' but one he willingly dives into here.

The Calling is a very well written Prequel to Dragon Age: Origins. The characters are all well written and engaging. While the story is a fairly basic dungeon crawl, the events are designed well. The fight scene with the dragon, for one, is awesomely illustrated and grabs one's heart strings. I would reccomend this novel to anyone who enjoys fantasy.

Not a bad yarn. It answered a stack of questions and really got me seeing Loghain's perspective finally. Something I could never appreciate in the computer game. And I finished the book wanting to read more.

Only really lost me with some of the battles. People take bite wounds where they should have armour. They take arrows or spear thrusts that should drop them in their tracks and yet they somehow survive long enough to be healed. Its like the laws of the universe in which Thedas exists are the same as the rules which govern the computer game - which are mere contrivances for the sake of playability.