Hear ye. Hear ye. I finished a book

The Gathering Storm - by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

 

I have been waiting for this book to be written since the last book was published in 2005. I don't know why I have been so addicted to this series since my attention span for books usually doesn't expand beyond a few thousand pages. But I love it and therefore I read it. I even got most of the Melot family hooked on them as well ... MuHA ha haha ha ha ha ha! cough cough cough. (darn asthma reeks havoc on evil laughing.) Ahem! ...Anyway, this here is my review and some thoughts and feelings, on Wheel of Time Book 12: The Gathering Storm.

I finished reading this book last night. around 9:30 pm. I have been reading it since 10/29/09 off and on in the evenings and a little during my lunch breaks. It wasn't terribly hard to set down and go do something else until I hit the Egwene chapters.

As a whole, this book was pretty good. I do have some complaints about it, mainly the over use of metaphors. I think it averaged out to about one per page for the 766 pages of the novel. Oh, and SO MANY sentences that were formed as questions that I personally felt that it didn't need. It drove me crazy... this is like that. That is like this. what are the heroes to do?

Please, Please, Please find some other way to describe something other then the usage of metaphors, similes and leading questions! I can, and I'm not even a professional writer! ugh!

There was also a lot of redundancies, one paragraph would say the exact same thing as the one above it just worded differently. Once you state the point of what you're saying, move on, it doesn't need to be repeated six times. The people reading the WOT series are smart enough to get it on the first run through.

Another thing I also hated, but can get over, is that the author re-introduced all the characters giving a brief back story to all of them taking up so much time that could have been spent furthering the plot.... but on the other hand out of the 11 previous books there were times when it became annoying when characters would appear again after 3 or 4 books of not being on screen and you have to stop and say "wait, am I supposed to know this person??" Robert Jordan believed that his readers were smart enough to figure it out, and Brandon Sanderson seems to be dumbing it all down a little too much.

For the most part I did enjoy the book. I was enthralled by White Tower plot line and the things that were revealed. This story arc above all others in all the novels has kept my attention the most. I desperately wanted the struggles to be resolved and the way it happened (finally!) was pretty good and I was satisfied. There were some nice ends to some smaller plot lines that fit into the White Tower arc, and a revelation about a certain Aes Sedai that I had pretty much put together for myself over the years.

There were some characters in the book that were a little off from how Robert Jordan had written them. Aviendha was a bit whinny for me. Perrin seemed too dismissive. Rand is just a plain ol' jerk (that's nothing new, just a different perspective of it) Thom was too broody... and even though there was ample room to let some other minor characters shine they were just kind of glazed over. I have heard a lot of complaints about Mat's character, but for the most part I found him to still be okay for the most part. But I have always thought that Mat was well written because that is the character that maybe Robert Jordan had based on himself, so having someone else come in and take over a character that was  someone else's personal image in writing it is bound to make the character different. Thus it is for all of the WOT people. They are being written by someone else so they're different because that's how Brandon Sanderson has written them.

I found the end of the book hard to read. It really lost my attention at some points and I found myself reading the same pages more then once because I just couldn't focus. I guess I just didn't really care what happened to the character at that point after all the build up and all the stupid that I read throughout the entire book. Really!?! that's it? Grr.

But like I said. As a WHOLE, I did enjoy the book. I cried a little, I laughed a little and I spent too many nights up way past the time I should have been asleep. I'm still looking forward to reading the Towers of Midnight a year from now, hopefully by the time it comes out they'll have edited out all the useless writing flaws and have a great penultimate book for us fans to read... I'm waiting.