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Rating, much less reviewing, this book is hard for me. It's beautifully written, yet I was angry while reading it. I am angry at the end, even while appreciating how things played out and being satisfied with how it was handled. It's not through any fault in the writing; as always, Guy Gavriel Kay's writing is beautiful. The things that happen in the book are SUPPOSED to make the reader angry, at least if the reader has a hard time accepting an unfair status quo, and it's disconcerting because it's all told in such a beautiful way.

Overall, I like the first book quite a bit more. I did appreciate two specific things from this one though:

First, Bad Wednesday actually had a sense of menace in regards to whether Jane would be kept in the bowl against her will. I don't really remember a sense of danger at any point in the first book, so that was an interesting addition.

Secondly, Bert was in the last chapter. I love Bert, so this little scene raised the entire book in my estimation.

Honey in the Tea, by itself, is easily 5 stars. It's one of my favorites in the entire Wheel of Time. I put it amidst up there up with The Road to the Spear.

The Golden Crane has one of the best single moments in the series. Also 5 stars.

The Mat stuff is 4. The Rand stuff is pretty good. So is most of the rest of it, with two unfortunate exceptions: the Perrin and Faile stuff REALLY drags the book down for me, so do the Elayne chapters.

So I guess that if I had to use one word to describe this book it would be “uneven”.

Without Honey in the Tea and The Golden Crane, I'd give it a 3. But those two are so good that I'll give it a 4.

Frankly I felt that much of the book dragged, and I kept reading because I was already invested in the characters after the first book. Things did pick up in the last fourth or so of the book, there was an excitement and urgency that had been missing until then. Even so, it wasn't as exciting as The Final Empire. Part of it may be that The Final Empire was ultimate a heist story, and that shifting gears to long, drawn out politics in this one was perhaps too abrupt a change (not that I have a problem with with books about political machinations, I just think in this particular book this dragged down the narrative).

I also felt that the loss of Kelsier, who was an extremely engaging character, left a voice that The Well of Ascension never quite managed to fill with any of the other characters.

I actually liked this one a lot more than A Game of Thrones... probably at least in part because it never made me so angry that I had to stop reading for several weeks. For the record, what made me angry in A Game of Thrones was Sansa's stupidity, and although she was in way likable to me in this one, at least she didn't make me rage. This one also Arya being the awesomest character in the entire cast, and Tyrion also being pretty cool.

I will that I think the change in point of view hurts in the sense that not all characters' stories are as interesting. Bran's in particular, and although I think Jon Snow is a great character, I wasn't at all invested in his story until his last chapter.

Eh.

Let me just say, I really wanted to like this book. It wasn't bad, but I found it to be extremely frustrating, in large part because of the lack of moral complexity, particularly in regards to the one-dimensional, moustache-twirling villains, none of whom were believable as actual human. Their thirst for revenge for perceived humiliations and power wasn't presented as a believable motivation, but was a caricature taken to ridiculous extremes, basically so their schemes could function as reverse deux ex machina whose purpose was to service the plot by throwing obstacles and misfortunes in the protagonists' way.

Other than that, I thought that the character voices and the dialogue came off as way too modern for the setting, and I personally thought the long passages on architecture, while fascinating in a different context, took away from the plot. But neither of those things bothered me as much as the lack of moral complexity.

Rating, much less reviewing, this book is hard for me. It's beautifully written, yet I was angry while reading it. I am angry at the end, even while appreciating how things played out and being satisfied with how it was handled. It's not through any fault in the writing; as always, Guy Gavriel Kay's writing is beautiful. The things that happen in the book are SUPPOSED to make the reader angry, at least if the reader has a hard time accepting an unfair status quo, and it's disconcerting because it's all told in such a beautiful way.