I kind of don’t even know where to begin with this review. I’ve started half a dozen paragraphs while sitting here, and then deleted them all. Like, who wants to be the jerk who thinks one of their favorite authors took up another author’s life’s work and then did it better? But . . . UGH, I do think that! I do. I don’t think it’s any secret that I’ve had issues pretty much the whole way through the first eleven books of this series. […]
Robert Jordan’s last completed book.
I’m glad the last book Robert Jordan wrote was such a huge step up in quality from the ones before it. Seems like he was ready to get down to business finally. No matter what you think of him as a writer, I don’t think anyone can deny that it was a tragedy for him to die before he could finish out this thing that he’d been working on for so long, and so close to the end. I hope he knew his story had […]
Better than the last three books in the series, but still not great, Bob!
Okay, so, two and a half star book, for me. I waffled between two and three stars for ages, but I’m going with two, I think, for a couple of reasons. One, what is the arc here? It’s sort of Moiraine becoming a real Aes Sedai, but there isn’t really any emotional development on her part. She is the same person before she passes the test for the shawl as she is after. I liked that person for the first half, then she did some […]
This was a book but it wasn’t a story.
Normally in my WOT reviews I list things that actually happened (things of significance) in these books so as to illustrate how much space was taken up by non-essential real estate. How much Jordan veered from the idea of ‘the narrative’ as a concept. Quite literally, as of this book, Jordan lost the plot entirely. Nothing. Happens. In. This. Book. And my copy has 822 pages of text, not including the glossary and maps. There is infinitesimal movement on all fronts. Mostly the characters just […]
Only two more (and a side-novel) until Sanderson!
How many more ways can I find to say the same things about this series? A series whose problems I identified as early as book three, and which has continued to embrace those problems rather than fix them. Presumably because Jordan didn’t see them as problems but rather as features. Which is one of the problems. It’s a whole problematical circle of problems, and ouroboroses eating their tails and such (a fitting image since the Wheel of Time is basically an ouroboros sailing some sort […]
How many more books until Brandon Sanderson? Ohhhh, it’s four. That’s so many.
My crawl through this series continues. To be honest, I’d optimistically hoped that I’d be able to finish it by the end of 2017. I was in a good position to, having already read the first five books. Nine books in twelve months? Easy peasy. Except . . . each book has gotten progressively harder to get through. Less and less happens. The flaws stand out more as the plot thins. I’ve gotten through three of these books in ten months. Even if I manage […]