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.
Lloyd’s Best Books of 2024
Continuing the annual tradition, here are my utterly subjective and eccentric selections for the top 5 books I read in 2024.
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.
The Dragon Reborn Review
It gives us immense character growth from viewpoint and side characters, massively raises the stakes and complexity of the plot, and sets the stage for the broadening war against the Dark One coming in the subsequent installments.
The Great Hunt Review
It is possible both to read The Great Hunt as a contained, quest-style fantasy, following the chase after the Horn of Valere after its theft by agents of evil, and as an installment of a vaster epic in which this quest is a kind of backdrop to the main drama of our protagonists, and especially the struggle against destiny.
New Spring Review
It is Jordan at probably the height of his powers, managing with skill and finesse a task that stumps other skilled authors.
Eye of the World Review
The Wheel of Time turns, and the ages come again – in this case, it brings at long last my reread of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.
The Return of the King Review
At the end of The Two Towers, if you're not familiar with the plot already, you'd probably believe that this story is not going to end well. Of course, the biggest spoiler of this book is its own title, which Tolkien did not pick. His original choice for the title of the third part of The Lord of the Rings was The War of the Ring, but he was persuaded to change it to the more positive, and arguably more descriptive, The Return of the King. Knowing this history, I'm not entirely certain which title I prefer. However, I am entirely certain that I enjoyed this part of the story just as much as the others.
The Black Elfstone Review
Where do I even start with a Shannara review? Shannara is epic fantasy in the very literal sense of the word, spanning hundreds of years of in-world history across myriad series and trilogies and stand-alone novels. Perhaps Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere may eventually be larger in literary scope, but even that will likely not sprawl so much as Shannara. Where a series like Wheel of Time covers a single story arc, Shannara has era, ages, and dozens of independent arcs. Sometimes, one has to wonder if Terry Brooks can bring himself to write anything that isn't Shannara: supposedly his Knight of the Word trilogy began as something new, and morphed into a prelude to Shannara.
IGC Publishing 