My memory of the first two Dragon Age games aren't branded across my brain like some games – where are the Cole Phelps novels? – so I'm not entirely sure where The Masked Empire sits in the chronology of the games, but the book definitely feels like it came from that universe. Mages, elves treated as second-class (or barely classed) beings, political machinations, rules of honour, and otherworldly beings popping up at the most opportune times.
The opening of The Masked Empire is slow and the characters ill-defined as the author tries to provide some context for world and educate readers that have never played Dragon Age. After the first third of the book, it feels like there's some actual direction to the story about an Empress hanging on to power against a tide of political backstabbing, a movement toward abolishment of slavery (or at least giving elves more rights), and knights bound by honour. At one moment there's was this fleeting thought that The Masked Empire was somehow a re-imagining of the Abraham Lincoln story, complete with emancipation and civil war. However, the Abraham Lincoln in this story is woman involved in a lesbian relationship with an elven assassin.
If that last sentence makes the book sound like /fic it doesn't actually go that far. It's not even at the level of a romance novel, which is a little disappointing if only because there was a chance to offer something as a radical departure from staid fantasy novels.
Or even other fantasy novels.
Maybe the author has never read the Wheel of Time series (though I doubt it) or even the host of sci-fi novels that explore wormholes, but the last third of the book has the party of remaining characters venturing through a series of portals connected by an elfen dream world that allows the band to scamper across expansive portions of the real world, fighting increasingly stronger and more powerful enemies at each stopping point. Close your eyes and you can almost see the action happening on-screen and possibly what keys you're hitting.
If the fight scenes toward the end weren't written with some punch and competency, the first time the party walked through a portal I would have stopped reading. It's extremely easy to see where the book is going, but there's enough entertainment along the way to make it at least interesting from the point of view of someone that likes fantasy and video games.
I can't separate myself from the fact I've played a good deal of Dragon Age, so trying to make an honest statement about who will and won't like this book is clouded. If you're a fan of Dragon Age, you'll probably like the chance to explore some other aspects of the world and get more details on the history, but coming into the experience more or less blind, it's a tougher sell because there's nothing memorable about The Masked Empire, nothing that separates itself from the crowd of fantasy novels. Examining the book this way -- trying to imagine how will and won't like this book -- is largely pointless because I don't know how you'd respond to it, but I can say that it's enjoyable enough for some secondary reading – the kind of reading one might do after slogging through high literature, a palette cleanser rather than some thinly veiled treaty on the human condition.
- Aaron Simmer
