It's a fitting last outing for Jordan, highlighting his distinguishing skills: ability to manage a large cast, embrace multiple perspectives, advance intertwining plot threads, bring secondary and tertiary characters to life, provide a sense of foreboding balanced with a glimmer of hope.
Crossroads of Twilight Review
Long series aren’t for everyone, but if you’ve made it this far, I think it’s fair for an author to take advantage of the scope of the form to tell a story in a spanning way that shorter forms couldn’t support.
Winter’s Heart Review
Nine books into Wheel of Time, a series famous for its length and detail, I found myself thinking the series could really be longer.
Path of Daggers Review
One of Jordan’s strengths, which I am noticing more in this reread, is that he is able to drop in events in earlier books which seem like they may not go anywhere, which then become significant multiple books later.
The Faerie Queen Review
I almost gave up after finishing the first book, but there were enough elements that intrigued me to continue into the second, and I’m sometimes a little stubborn, so I pushed on. I’m glad I persevered.
A Crown of Swords Review
While being manipulative has a negative, scheming connotation, it is an inevitable byproduct of how we interact with each other and the diverse goals we all have in those interactions.
The Dragon Waiting Review
A few, core, what-if questions form the foundation of Ford’s genre-blending The Dragon Waiting. The most important is what if Byzantium adopted a policy of religious toleration instead of Christianity? Oh, and what if there were vampires and wizards, too?
Lord of Chaos Review
Mainly, this is another book about Rand, and Jordan again manages to convey both the sense that Rand is going mad, and how each step and action he takes is reasonable and logical for itself.
The Fires of Heaven Review
The fifth book in Wheel of Time starts Rand al’Thor on a leadership arc that will take many books to resolve, as he wrestles with a question that few of us will ever have to confront, but which bedevils theories of leadership, especially in other periods of history: how much can a leader allow himself or herself to care, on the individual level, about the people around her or him?
The Shadow Rising Review
Wheel of Time, to a certain extent, works by leaning into tropes and making them more, rather than avoiding or subverting them. The advantage of a story sprawling across fourteen books is that what starts as a trope can be fully developed and made into as unique a part of the worldbuilding as the most inventive, original aspects.
IGC Publishing 