SFF Author: Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

Here’s another really fun installment of The Wheel of Time. Like The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt kept me thoroughly entertained. Everything I said in the review above goes for this book, too. It’s fast-paced and full of plot. I think this is the best book in the series.

We get to meet some excellent secondary heroes and villains in The Great Hunt — Egeanin and the Seanchan from across the sea who use captured and chained women with power to fight for them,

The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan (on audio)

In The Dragon Reborn, Rand finally starts to discover his new talents. Unfortunately, we don’t get to watch that happen. We only see a few glimpses of him learning to use his power. It makes me wonder if it was just easier for Jordan to show us the newly developed Rand rather than to explain how he got that way.

A couple of times here (and in later books) we’re told that Rand doesn’t really know how he wields the power — he just does.

The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan

For being such a long book (nearly 1000 pages in my trade paperback copy), amazingly little happens in The Fires of Heaven, and this is why so many readers have abandoned this otherwise interesting story. Approximately the first third of the novel contains so much recap and repetition that, if I’d had “my hair in a proper braid,” I would have been yanking it as often as Nynaeve does.

The formula for the first 100 pages or so goes something like this:  One or two lines of dialogue,

A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan

My reviews of The Wheel of Time novels are getting just as repetitive as the actual books. There’s really not much more to say. A Crown of Swords is another long slow installment in which there are too many detailed descriptions of clothing, references to spanking, concerns about bosoms, and people blushing. There are pages and pages which chronicle secondary characters’ extensive internal thoughts. But what bugs me most, though, are the constant depictions of people and places as if they have a corporate personality:

Men strutted arrogantly along the streets with often ragged vests and no shirts,

The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan

The best thing I can say about The Path of Daggers is that it is significantly shorter than the last few novels have been — only 700 pages (mass market paperback) compared to the 900-1100 page novels that have preceded it. There is much less of the repetitive backstory. I guess Mr. Jordan finally realized that new readers aren’t jumping in at this point.

However, that’s not to say that there are 700 pages of plot here,

Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan

The first six chapters of Winter’s Heart follow Perrin and Faile after Faile is abducted by the Shaido Aiel. The next several chapters follow Elayne as she returns to Caemlyn and prepares to make a bid for her mother’s crown. These two storylines are incredibly dull and I confess that I skimmed over a lot of it and read the excellent cross-referenced chapter summaries at Encyclopaedia WOT. I read Winter’s Heart years ago and I just did not feel like once again sitting in on Elayne’s steward’s descriptions of the rats in the Caemlyn sewers or Perrin’s angst about Faile (good riddance,