thepunktheory
Written on Jul 7, 2022
I’m not going to lie, it took me approximately forever and 15 days to finish this book. First of all, it is really long. We’re talking 1000 pages. However, on top of that, there isn’t much going on. I’m not sure how to convey this properly in a way that makes sense, but it felt like most of this book was world-building. I understand that Jordan wants to convey a lot of information about the different peoples in this story and their habits and customs. While I don’t mind some world-building, this was just a lot of it in one go without much other development. It wasn’t until almost the end of this book that the pace started to pick up again.
I’m starting to sense what I usually call the “Tolkien problem”. The author quite obviously knows a lot of words but concise and brief aren’t among them. Sure, give me some world-building but this could have been edited down *a lot*. Another thing that irritated me a bit (now that I think about it, that’s also a Tolkien thing to do) is that he seems to forget about certain characters. You don’t hear about them for essentially 800+ pages and as a reader, I just keep wondering, why? Did they die? Live happily ever after? Did the author just straight up forget about them? Just spread things about a bit more evenly. I’m begging you.
Despite the pace of this book being next to glacial, I enjoyed the story. Interestingly, I don’t think I have ever enjoyed a book this much where almost every single character is *so fucking annoying*. I know I’ve talked about this in the previous reviews, but Matt’s a twat, Nyneave keeps acting like a bitch all the time, I’m straight up gonna ignore that weird bit about Elayne and Thom that was going on for a moment. While I sympathize with Rand and surely would be a bit testy as well in his place, my patience is starting to wear thin. Especially now that Min has shown up I keep getting more and more irritated. I don’t understand at all why she is so smitten since it felt like they exchanged all of three words in the previous books. They are both behaving almost ridiculously.
I know I just complained a whole lot, but I did like the novel. In the final chapters, the story did finally regain some speed and it was once again difficult to put it down. I hope we will continue like this but from what I’ve heard the more concise writing I’m wishing for won’t come up until Brandon Sanderson took over. I feel like I would be a bit more forgiving with the slow pace if there weren’t so many more books and pages left. On my e-reader, I have all books combined into one (so I don’t have to remember the correct order) and page count wise I’m not even halfway through. To be honest, that can be a bit disenchanting. I read and read and feel like I made a lot of progress trudging through a story that isn’t going anywhere for almost 1000 pages and then you check the count and it’s essentially going nowhere.
