The Stolen Throne is the prequel to the video game Dragon Age: Origins. The story is set roughly thirty years before the events of the video game and it follows Maric, Loghain and Rowan on their way to free Ferelden from the Orlesian occupation.

As much as I like Gaider's work as lead writer for the video games: writing for video games and writing a novel are two different kind of shoes and his strength lies in being a writer for video games. The book's main issue is that it tells everything but rarely shows something, which leads to an overly long book. For example, the reader is told that Loghain warms up to Maric over time (to the point where they become friends) but there's rarely a scene where the development actually happens.

Starting from 40% onwards, Gaider just summarises several years in a few paragraphs, which is a) a massive change from the extensive earlier chapters and b) erases a lot of character growth and potential (inner) conflict for them. I still don't care much about Rowan because she's very much the "shieldmaiden"/"warrior maiden" archetype who's suddenly in love with Maric but also in love with Loghain but has otherwise no personality. I feel like even Morrigan and Alistair have more chemistry when they create Old God Child than Rowan and Maric will ever have. Concerning Maric and Loghain: you can see from where Cailin and Alistair have their himbo genes because Maric is ... something. Weirdly enough, sometimes it feels like he's quite smitten with Loghain (of course, the reader never gets the scenes to explain why it might be something) and the best Gaider could have done would have been to make Loghain-Maric-Rowan a fucking throuple and be done with it. Meanwhile, Loghain is just as unlikeable as in the video game. He's creepy and emotionally nonexistent and pushes Maric into "you have to make difficult decisions as a king", which leads to killing a woman because the women in Thedas get constantly sexually assaulted and murdered (which is even an issue with the video games for me).

The best part of the book was certainly when Maric, Loghain, Rowan and another character are in the Deep Roads and show personality in their dialogue while the entire setting is so tense (like most Deep Roads scenes in the video games). Meanwhile, the villain of the story - the usurper - is finished off in the epilogue, which is so unsatisfying since he was the reason why Ferelden flocked to Maric's banner.

Personally, the book could have been shorter if the goal was to introduce the background story for Origins and why certain quests/characters are of importance in the video game because there's little to no new information in the novel. The constant summarisation would have worked if Gaider had written a shorter book, so the reader would be updated on major events or would have written a book that would have covered even more years and where every chapter would have been dedicated to a specific event/period. As it stands, you could read a bunch of wiki pages and would be just as good due to the lack of new information for fans. Just skip this one unless your goal is to read all novels (text and graphic ones) before Dragon Age: The Veilguard comes out.

To authors: please do not let your characters have sex while they are gravely injured to the point of blacking out mid-conversation from the pain. It is rather unbelievable.